Nessus
Who, What, Why
• piis8@yahoo.com
– isac “piss”
• Tenable Nessus 4.2.x
• Seccubus
• Inprotect
• Improving the use of the tools
• Lots of new features and changes
**Some statements contained herein are my own poorly validated conclusions and may be utter
rubbish.
Objective
• Nessus
– Quick overview
– Version 4.x , What is new
• Seccubus
– Why
– Bulk scanning
• Inprotect
– Why
• Data
– The bane of my existance
Nessus
The Nessus® vulnerability scanner is the world-leader in active scanners,
featuring high-speed discovery, configuration auditing, asset profiling,
sensitive data discovery and vulnerability analysis of your security
posture. Nessus scanners can be distributed throughout an entire
enterprise, inside DMZs and across physically separate networks.
-- Tenable
In computer security, Nessus is a proprietary comprehensive vulnerability
scanning program. It is free of charge for personal use in a nonenterprise environment. Its goal is to detect potential vulnerabilities on
the tested systems.
--wilipedia
Nessus
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Apr 04 1998 first alpha version released on bugtraq
May 17 2000 1.0.0 released
Feb 24 2003 2.0.0 released
Dec 07 2004 2.2.1 released
– Foreshadowing of a future
• Jan 1 2005 Feed Model Changes
• Dec 12 2005 3.0.0 released
– Closed Source, proprietary license
• Oct 30 2006 2.2.9 released
– Last open source build
Nessus
• Mar 12 2008 3.2 released
• Jul 31 2008 Feed Model Changes
– Registered / Direct  Home/Professional
• Feb 16 2009 Mail Lists Disabled
– Web based ‘Discussion Forums’ / nessus-announce stays
• Apr 09 2009 4.0.0 released
• Nov 30 2010 4.2.0 released
– Web based interface
• Apr 15 2010 4.2.2 released
Shiny
• Web Interface, no more stand-alone client
– Flash / XMLRPC communications
– Keep a copy of the 4.0.2 client
– Web Interface is still unique to each scan engine
• NTP 1241 disabled for Home Feed
– Other limitations on Home Feed, ie. 15 max hosts
– NTP 1241 enabled for Professional Feed
– …but for how long?
• Shared Policies
• New xml output format, .nessus v2
• Still no easy way to share reports
Flash
• Why, Why, Why, Why
– <insert paranoia here>
• Renaud states
– “In the (not-so-distant) future, yes, HTML5 will probably
be the way to go and our backend is ready for that.” …
“However, today, we use Flash because it's the most
efficient technology to take us where we need to be.”
• Adobe
• Flash Decompilers
XMLRPC
• ???
– It's remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the
encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing
complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned. -xmlrpc.com
• Future scripting / integration with 3rd party tools?
– libs available for perl / ruby / C / .net / php / etc.
• 3rd party catch-up
• Kost on Freshmeat
– Net::Nessus::XMLRPC (perl)
– nessus-xmlrpc (ruby)
• Port 1241 ?
Home vs. Professional
Home
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Free
Max 15 hosts (simultaneous)
No Credential Scanning
No Compliance checks
Kost on Freshmeat
No SCADA checks
No NTP / port 1241
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Professional
$1200 / year
Unlimited hosts
Credential Scanning
Compliance Checks
SCADA checks
NTP /port 1241 support
Compliance (ProFeed only)
• As of May 4th , 68 audit files.
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Windows best practices
*nix (linux, bsd, solaris, hpux) best pratices
Antivirus
Confidential data
PCI / Banking data
SSN
Copyright / P2P
Govt Keywords
And more
Hacks
• Bypass Home restrictions (unconfirmed)
– Did not get this to work. Seems like it works as long as you are offline.
• Shared Reports (scriptable)
– Drop reports to local user space
• 4.0.2 on new linux
– Tenable only gives you an .rpm ( Fedora - libssl / libcrypto dependency)
– Copy old .0.9.8n and symlink it to .8
Hacks
• Report Sharing
• Files have “cryptic” names
• Files stored in /opt/nessus/var/nessus/users/<username>/reports
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5ef4e929-8263-99ac-8ef1-78e85fe6d0165b65e004c8e3ead4
5ef4e929-8263-99ac-8ef1-78e85fe6d0165b65e004c8e3ead4.name
5ef4e929-8263-99ac-8ef1-78e85fe6d0165b65e004c8e3ead4.nessus
5ef4e929-8263-99ac-8ef1-78e85fe6d0165b65e004c8e3ead4.nessus.v1
• Script a cp job to move files to alternate user space
• http://seccubus.com/ written by Frank Breedijk, Security Engineer at
Schuberg Philis
• Lightweight web based front end, perl and php with a flat file db
• User authentication is dependent on the web server
• Good for a small team does not scale well to a large user base
scanmonitor.pl
• Not a fan of cron
• Not a fan of “empty” scans
• Needed a more flexible scheduler
• scanmonitor.pl allows for a continuous scan loop of the entire enterprise
with minimal empty cycles between scan jobs
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initial scans 60K IPs in 16 hours on 4 scan engines
• **Can quickly eat hard drive space and memory
mrtg / resources
mrtg / resources
Inprotect
• http://inprotect.sourceforge.net/ written by Greg Kuhnert and team
• Web based front end, perl and php with a sql db
• Nice system, should scale nicely to a large user base
• Installation is improving but still a bit rough
DATA DATA DATA
What’s next
• Automated parsing of critical findings
• Trend exposure time
• Compare known postures
Demo
‘The Making of Horror’ Joshua Hoffine