Re: Vulnerability scanners

["R. DuFresne" <dufresne () sysinfo com>]

On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, Chris Sharp wrote:

> > Does Qualys' claim to more
> > vulnerability signatures and faster/easier updates
> hold
> > water?
>
> Well the front page of qualys.com claims that they
> scan for 2531 vulnerabilities, that's twice what
> Nessus (1378) or ISS (1218) claim.
>
> As for updates, it's all on their servers and
> hardware, set it up once and forget abotu software
> updates. Fire and forget. Not sure about the rate of
> false positives, but my impression is that they're
> cautious, only reporting False positives for dangerous
> bugs.
>
> They don't do active tests, so they don't exploit
> known bugs and crash servers during testing. A lot of
> Nessus modules need to be launched manually and result
> in the scanned machine needing a reboot - somewhat
> inconvenient but it removes any doubt as to how
> vulnerable you are.

Not totally, one of the recent Information Security issues tested nessus,
iss, and a few other scanners.  Not one came out with shining colors,
though iss and nessus ranked first and second.  but, it was what they
could not do well and such that was the real meat of the article.  The
scan is only the beginning, a point of reference from which the real work
begins in trying to ascertain how vulnerable one might be.


Thanks,

Ron DuFresne
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