Re: Why eEye Retina (was MBSA scanner)

["clarke-cummings () columbus rr com" <clarke-cummings () columbus rr com>]

Thanks to everyone for the great feedback and discussion on my initial
question.  I appreciate all the feedback, and we've expanded our list of
candidates and are trying to get eEye to help us out.

I think I need to qualify my "not impressive" comment from my initial post.
I certainly think that eEye's research team and the quality of their team
is impressive.  I am not, howeve, impressed with their sales support for
our trial.  This causes serious doubts over how we would be treated as
customers.  So we have no complaints with the reseach and quality of people
there, just the sales and/or support response (they were going to email a
new version or license on Monday and we haven't seen it yet.)

It sounds like many others have had similar complaints, both with sales and
too many false positives.  I understand that false positives and negatives
are to be expected and the results need to be investigated.  But I'd like
to keep those numbers down, and there were significant differences between
scanners.  eEye hit the most false positives, that after investigation,
were patched.  

Thanks again,
Clarke

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Shawn Edwards shawn.edwards () nokia com
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 09:17:08 +0000
To: mmurray () ncircle com, clarke-cummings () columbus rr com,
pen-test () securityfocus com
Subject: Re: Why eEye Retina (was MBSA scanner)


ext Mike Murray wrote:

> > I know for a fact that they have some very skilled persons 
> > doing dev there. ... Just check some of their development 
> > discoveries that's gotta count for something!
> >    
> While this is definitely an argument for the fact that a company has
> very smart people working for it (which is definitely not in question in
> eEye's case), I question the validity of the argument as far as the
> evaluation of a network VA tool.   
Agreed. And maybe my formatting of the email was mistaken.  I was moreso 
coming to the defence of the company on the blanket statement of not 
being 'impressive', but it was not meant as an exclusive criteria for 
evaluation of their products.  My evaluation discussion (albeit brief 
and somewhat thrown together) was moreso on three previous points.

> we'd all be
> buying something that Dave Aitel wrote.
>  
No doubt.

> While it is often given as a reason that one tool is better than
> another, it simply doesn't follow that an aptitude for discovering new
> vulnerabilities in code is the same as an aptitude for discovering known
> vulnerabilities in running services in the real world. 
And of course this is one of the strong points of nCircle's product (in 
my so far somewhat limited evaluation).  The statement I made on "Some 
may have better methodologies on enumeration" was with your methodology 
in mind. Of course I digress and won't bother touting one product over 
another as there are very many points of contention, and was hoping to 
keep my contribution to the conversation a little more 'high-level'.  
Thanks for the comments Mike!

br,

s

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