Nessus Network Auditing: Jay Beale Open Source Security Series (Jay Beale's Open Source Security) [Illustrated] [Paperback]

Renaud Deraison (Author), Noam Rathaus (Author), HD Moore (Author), Raven Alder (Author), George Theall (Author), Andy Johnston (Author), Jimmy Alderson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1931836086 | ISBN-13: 978-1931836081 | Publication Date: August 3, 2004 | Edition: 1

This book focuses on installing, configuring and optimizing Nessus, which is a remote security scanner for Linux, BSD, Solaris, and other Unices. It is plug-in-based, has a GTK interface, and performs over 1200 remote security checks. It allows for reports to be generated in HTML, XML, LaTeX, and ASCII text, and suggests solutions for security problems. As with many open source programs, Nessus is incredibly popular, incredibly powerful, and incredibly under-documented. There are many Web sites (including nessus.org) where thousands of users congregate to share tips, tricks, and hints, yet no single, comprehensive resource exists. This book, written by Nessus lead developers, will document all facets of deploying Nessus on a production network.

* Nessus is the premier Open Source vulnerability assessment tool, and was recently voted the "most popular" open source security tool of any kind.

* This is the first book available on Nessus and it is written by the world's premier Nessus developers led by the creator of Nessus, Renaud Deraison.

* The dramatic success of Syngress' SNORT 2.0 INTRUSION DETECTION clearly illustrates the strong demand for books that offer comprehensive documentation of Open Source security tools that are otherwise Undocumented.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jay Beale is a security specialist focused on host lockdown and security audits. He is the lead developer of the Bastille project, which creates a hardening script for Linux, HP-UX, and Mac OS X; a member of the Honeynet Project; and the Linux technical lead in the Center for Internet Security. A frequent conference speaker and trainer, Jay speaks and trains at the Black Hat and LinuxWorld conferences, among others. He co-authored the Syngress international best-seller Snort 2.0 Intrusion Detection (ISBN: 1-931836-74-4) and serves as the series and technical editor of the Syngress Open Source Security series. HD Moore is one of the founding members of Digital Defense, a security firm that was created in 1999 to provide network risk assessment services. In the last four years, Digital Defense has become one of the leading security service providers for the financial industry, with over 200 clients across 43 states. Noam Rathaus is the co-founder and CTO of Beyond Security, a company specializing in the development of enterprise-wide security assessment technologies, vulnerability assessment-based SOCs (security operation centers) and related products. He has contributed to several security-related open-source projects including an active role in the Nessus security scanner project. Renaud Deraison is the Founder and the primary author of the open-source Nessus vulnerability scanner project. He has worked for SolSoft, and founded his own computing security consulting company, Nessus Consulting. Raven Alder is a Senior Security Engineer for True North Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in network security design and implementation. She specializes in scalable enterprise-level security, with an emphasis on defense in depth. George A. Theall is a frequent contributor to the Nessus mailing lists, is the author of several popular Nessus-related tools and has also contributed rewrites of several of the supplemental scripts and associated documentation in Nessus, to be distributed starting with version 2.2.

Product Details

• Paperback: 550 pages
• Publisher: Syngress; 1 edition (August 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931836086
• ISBN-13: 978-1931836081
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,168,756 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Long overdue but worth the wait, December 5, 2004

By 

Richard Bejtlich "TaoSecurity" (Metro Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nessus Network Auditing: Jay Beale Open Source Security Series (Jay Beale's Open Source Security) (Paperback)

'Nessus Network Auditing' (NNA) is the definitive (and only) guide to the Nessus open source vulnerability assessment tool. I recommend all security professionals read this book. You may start as a Nessus user, but the book will help you become part of the Nessus community.

NNA features twelve contributors, but it doesn't suffer the fate of other books with similar high author counts. NNA manages to present fairly original material in each chapter, without a lot of overlap. I credit the lead authors and editors for keeping the contributors on track. They could have reduced the number of crashing printer stories, however.

Several chapters stood out from the others. Ch 1 explains the need for conducting vulnerability assessment. Ch 3 makes a good case for always installing from source code and not trusting precompiled binaries. Chs 8 and 9 deliver real value with insights into Nessus internals, such as scanning architecture and the Nessus Knowledge Base. Ch 10 presents crude albeit workable ways to measure bandwidth to alleviate loads caused by scans. Ch 11 is an excellent rationale for the Nessus Attack Scripting Language (NASL) written by Nessus' creator. I would have liked to have seen an appendix based on an actual (perhaps sanitized) scan, showing how a security admin selected tests, ran the scan, and validated results.

NNA suffers a few problems. A few typos are present, but nothing that distracts from the book's content. I did find the ch 4 author's mention of the TCP "triple handshake" to be odd. While not wrong, this process is usually called the "three-way handshake." The screenshots in appendix B are of poor quality and should be replaced in future editions.

Note that the Nessus version used in NNA varies from 2.0.9 to 2.0.10a, and the current edition is 2.2.0. Version creep is part of every technical book, and did not make a big difference at this point. When Nessus 2.4 is released, watch for the adoption of the new BOSS GUI to clearly alter the face of the Nessus interface.

Overall, NNA is an excellent technical resource for anyone charged with auditing network security. I have a greater appreciation for the Nessus architecture and its ability to do more in-depth host checks. Motivated readers can use this book to learn how to write their own NASL scripts and effectively deploy a distributed scanning architecture.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Invaluable content best suited for infrastructure use, December 18, 2004

By 

The Grumpy Hacker (Milwaukee - Top 5000 Reviewer!) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nessus Network Auditing: Jay Beale Open Source Security Series (Jay Beale's Open Source Security) (Paperback)

If you are, or are considering, using Nessus in a wide-scale/enterprise scanning infrastructure you will likely find everything you need to know in this book. If you are, or are considering, using Nessus for ad-hoc assessments (or penetration tests), this book will indeed provide a lot of valuable information but at a price: you'll have to read the whole thing to glean all the useful tips and you'll end up spending a lot of time getting intimately familiar with what's probably going to be just one of very many tools in your toolbox, getting only a fraction of your attention in each assessment. If you're new to vulnerability assessment or penetration testing (not just to Nessus) you should really read a few other books first, even though this one does contain some useful info on testing in general, for example, how to identify false positives and negatives.

There's a lot of good content but it tends to be all over the place--numerous sidebars and tables throughout are usually in context but could also have been placed elsewhere. The style, however, seems fairly consistent considering the book had 10 contributing authors and three editors, one of which is the creator of the subject of the book. Unfortunately Jay Beale, whose name appears prominantly on the cover, is merely an editor--a shame since I typically find his articles in Information Security magazine well-written and informative.

There are a just a couple downsides to this book. Like several other current Syngress titles it suffers from poor quality printing and paper with some very tiny and/or fuzzy screen shots, large print, and lack of whitespace--making it a little hard on the eyes. It also really would have been nice if it had included a CD with the current version of Nessus on it, since that's what the book's about after all.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a MUST read for all IT Security Engineers!, October 21, 2004

By 

Troy Schumaker (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nessus Network Auditing: Jay Beale Open Source Security Series (Jay Beale's Open Source Security) (Paperback)

I must admit, as a Nessus user for many many years now, I was excited to hear that a publication was finally becoming available on Nessus (isn't one astonished of how many actual Cisco/Microsoft/Java books exist). However, I was "pensive at best" when it came to actually purchasing a book that "appeared" to simply convey how to install/configure/run this award-winning IT Security tool.

To my pleasant surprise, the very evening I purchased the book, I found myself unable to put this book down, and in fact, stayed up nearly all night reading the entire thing. My overall rating? The best investment I'd spent for an IT Security book in several years. Hands down!

Thankfully, only about 1/3 of the book is spent on install/configure/running the product, the other 2/3rds of the publication convey keen insights surrounding the ins and outs of vulnerability assessments.

I submit that all IT Security Engineers should spent the money and time gaining "keen insights and perspectives" of Renaud Deraison, unquestionably a pioneer in the history of IT Security. True, a vulnerability assessment is only one (yet key) piece of the entire "Security Puzzle", nevertheless, if your job carries the title CISSP/CISM, and you're involved with IT Security (regardless of whether or not your vulnerability assessment tool du jour is Nessus or not) your understanding surrounding vulnerability assessments isn't complete til you've peered into the "Mind's eye" of Mr. Deraison.

Clearly, in the annals of IT Security, history will render him a Pioneer in the journey of protecting an organizations IT assets.