[Pdx-pm] Book Review: _Nessus Network Auditing_ (long)

Roth, Gabrielle gabrielle.roth at xo.com
Wed Dec 1 16:44:28 CST 2004


(It goes without saying this is not an official communique from my
employer, I do not speak for my employer, etc etc.)

_Nessus Network Auditing_
Deraison, R. et al; Beale, J. ed.
Publisher:  Syngress
ISBN: 1-931836-08-06.
508 pp, $49.94 USA, $69.95 CAN.

Official Blurb from O'Reilly:
"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.".

Intended audience: This book would be great for people who've never used
nessus, but have some network & sysadmin  experience.  This book was of
particular interest to me, because I need to learn nessus quick-like.  A
little more than half the book is useful without having the app in front
of you.  You will want to have a nessus server & something to test scan
to follow along with the chapters on installation, scanning, results
interpretation, and writing your own plug-ins.  This book is better as a
how-to guide than a reference.

What I liked:
- The layout is easy to follow & you know what's going to come next,
which increases the books readability.
- *Lots* of good generic security info, especially in the sidebars.  For
a security newbie, the book is worth reading for  that info even if
you're not interested in using nessus.
- When there's more than one way to do something, the advantages &
disadvantages of both are clearly discussed.
- Very clear writing style.
- Each chapter has a "summary"; a "solutions fasttrack", a bulleted list
of the material covered in the chapter; and a FAQ.

What needed some help:
- Typos & grammatical errors.  Yes, I realize some of them are
unavoidable, but it seems there is a rush to publish technical material
because it's so quickly out-of-date, and quality is sacrificed in that
rush.
- Key words could have been bolded or italicized on their first
introduction to make it easier to find stuff later.
- I would have liked to see equivalent attention to the cli as to the
GUI, but that may have been beyond the scope of the book.
- The index.  One of my pet peeves is crappy indexes.  I decided to test
the index by looking up  "database", because about half a chapter was
devoted to saving scan results in a database, and that chapter was not
listed in the index.  Stee-rike one.

Bottom line:
Worth the price. I bought my own copy today.

- gabrielle -
vi vi vi...the editor of the beast

-----

My chapter-by-chapter notes:
Ch 1 Vulnerability assessment
Good overview of what a vulnerability assessment is & tools used to find
them.

Ch2 Introducing Nessus
Useful advice on how to choose a security consultant (required reading
for PHBs.)
Not-too-long paragraph on the history of nessus, but I'm not sure what's
useful about the graph of the growth of the nessus user community.

Ch3 Installing Nessus
Asserts that nessus is "one of the easiest packages to install".
Because I will not be installing nessus myself, I independently verified
this with a poll.  All responders (n=2) disagreed.
Great advice about choosing a server - they actually have hard numbers
for the specs. =:O
The lists of mirrors could probably have been replaced with the URL for
the main nessus site (why make the book unneccessarily fatter?)
I quit tracking typos/grammatical errors in this chapter.
Great reasons to install from source & super-detailed install
instructions.

Ch4 Running your first scan
VERY good advice about getting written permission from Those in
Positions of Authority before running *any* scan.
Good ammo to use with PHBs about why you should run vuln testing.
Info about how to use the GUI; don't be tempted to skip this because
there is some good security advice buried in this section.
Concise explanation of ip subnetting.
Useful plan outline for routine scans.

Ch5 Interpreting results
Navigating the GUI, how to figure out what you're looking at, some
gotchas.

Ch6 Vulnerability types
Maybe this would have been better after Ch 1, it kind of interrupts the
flow here.  It seems that  "False Positives" (Ch7) would better follow
"Interpreting Results" (Ch5).

CH7 False Positives
Lots of examples.   Offers ways to deal with false positives, as the
sheer number of them can be enough to put one off vuln testing entirely.


Ch8  Under the hood
Good overview of how nessus works.  Didn't need to have the app in front
of me to learn anything from this chapter.

Ch9 Knowledge Base
Seems like a good overview, would need to follow along at home to really
test this one out.

Ch10 Enterprise Scanning  (this was the most useful chapter in the book)
Good info about where to start if you have no idea:  what to scan first,
how to report it, bandwidth considerations, etc.  Good advice about who
to warn & how to approach them.
Excellent guidelines for approaching a scan in a sc
Recommendations about storing scan results in a database (ooh, that is
exciting).
AND, a list of common problems you might encounter!  Grand!

Ch11 NASL
Introduction to the NASL scripting language.  This is hard going without
hands-on following along.

Ch12  The nessus user community
Where to go to get help.  More detail than was useful to me.



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