vulnerability scanners not effective? or just a false-positive?

["Joel Jose" <joeljose420 () BonBon net>]

hy ppl,
           i was pen-testing a network. First i do a manual check with my
own methods, i use nmap,hping,metasploit,telnet,dig,whois..etc and then for
the confirmation i scan with nessus, just to be sure that i havent
overlooked any. But, today something very strange happened; i found a huge
vulnerability which could drastically compramise the network. The
directories were not protected. I could easily access the template
directory, and view the internal directory structure. I even got access to a
few files, which contained backup data of some of thier old employees. now,
if i had "known" the names of the *important* diectories, i am sure i would
have been able to access them as a piece of cake. Ofcourse the network is
safe as long as the attacker doesnt "learn" the name of the important
directories. But i think it is a very "huge" vulnerability. and nessus didnt
even give a hinch!!

and one more quest. How many of you think that the existance of the default
banners in services(eg apache default error pages) are a security threat, if
not high, atleast medium?. I do.

joel.



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