[NTLUG:Discuss] linux based security tool...recommendation

[Chris Cox]

MadHat wrote:
...snip..
> 
> nmap is great and will do a great job of telling you what ports you have 
> open and  in many cases what is listening, but will not tell you if the 
> daemon listening is vulnerable or not.  Even if you find out you have 
> BIND 4.9.2, you still ahve to search securityfocus.com or do google 
> searches and find info on the vulnerability, then see if you can find a 
> way to exploit it to test if you are vulnerable to attack.  Nessus will 
> use nmap and run scans on what it finds open.   Unfortunately there are 
> a lot of false positives with nessus.  Some of the nasl scripts are 
> written poorly and ahve hard coded ports, for example, so even though it 
> is a web server running on port 25, it tries running sendmail vulns, or 
> if sendmail is running on port 80, it will runn the sendmail vuln on 
> port 25 whether or not it is open.    But I digress.
> 

ISS scanner has some of the same problems though... just can't
be perfect.  I think nessus is just as good ... of course
it doesn't cost $$$$$$ like ISS does.