What is the best remote security scanner? nessus?

TIA

If you're familiar with linux, sniffers, port scanners and such, then have a look at the new BackTrack DVD. It contains all the tools necessary to perfom penetration testing, security audits, and so on.

Kind regards,

Eric

Have a look at http://www.metasploit.com/. I've been pen testing for a while, and have used nessus which is good, but sploit is better.

Surely Nessus is a vulnerability scanner whereas Metasploit is an exploit framework.
It will carry out exploits but you need to know where to target them first, this is where Nessus comes in.
From that standpoint, I would see them as complementary rather than alterrnatives to the same end.

To the OP, yes Nessus would be seen as one of the best remote vulnerability scanners. I also hear good things about Core Impact, but have no direct experience of it.

Now a days, it is very important to do penetration testing of Web Application, as in my knowledge 70+ attacks have been noticed on web applications. Which means need application level firewall which can inspect every packet that dest. for http.

All though, there are many open-source distribution that provide some great tools for penetration testing of web application.

These tools are under GPL and some are Free Edition.

Distribution for Penetration testing are,
Licensed : GPL (Opensource)
BackTrack
Samurai
There are many others, these are enough for you to take start with.

You can find more tools regarding Penetration testing,Sql injection, XSS Attacks and Security updates on ;

Penetration Testing

Application Security Scanning tools

Make sure, these tools should be use in positive way for Your Web application security neither for negative use. Use it at your own risk.

If you need to know more about penetration testing, i will help you out.

Regards.

I'm not sure what you're saying here... that there have been at least 70 attacks on web apps? Ever? There have been hundreds... and thousands, so whereas you're not wrong, you're hardly accurate.

Also, L7 firewalling is not really going to help protect your webapp, since all traffic ingressing to a webserver is HTTP. You might be thinking of a webapp firewall, which will scan http requests for potential script injection attacks. ModSecurity for Apache is one example.

Another good defense is a SQL proxy, like GreenSQL.

Well, may be you understood wrong . My point was exactly what you said.

You will strongly need application level firewall. While ModSecurity is the best current available firewall for the DOS attacks protection and other enhancements. You can use additionally other moduels e.g mod_evasive, mod_qos is not bad option.


Thanks for your valuable comments.

Agreed, however this sort of firewalling does not really come under the heading of application layer, or at least not in the OSI layer 7 sense.

I wonder how they'd fare against a low bandwidth DoS attack, such as Slowloris? not too well I would think.

Anyhow... lets not get too off topic.

Against slowloris attacks... mod_qos may help.

wow!
Thank you everyone for your input...keep it comming...so Nessus would be a good place to start to get security improved on my Linux Laptop?

Is Nessus a common tool for many Linux Users? Sorry for the noob questions...trying to get myself out of the Windows mentality.


Thanks!

What sort of security you want to improve on your laptop?

Well...overall I want to be able establish good practices while using Linux, to be able detect whenever someone is attempting to compromise my laptop while on the Internet. I'm running Fedora 11 right now, I have both SElinux and the Firewall enabled, I have turned off unnecessary services from starting, I have updated the Kernel and applied all security updates. I would like to get a better understanding of what to look for such as log files and be able to monitor ports which are open or block intrusions. I'm not really doing anything specific..just using my laptop on a wireless network..so I want to be more knowledgeable and prepared.

Hi,

Seems to me you want to work the other way around, that is, not penetration testing but intrusion detection to find out who's trying or might be trying to access your system while on the internet.

Penetration testing is testing for example the security on a server you administer or a client's system to find and after that repair security holes.

Intrusion detection is monitoring what/who is accessing or trying to access a system owned or administered by you.

SNORT is an OpenSource IDS system (Intrusion Detection System) and in combination with iptables and scripts can be 'upgraded' to an IPS (Intrusion Prevention System).

Kind regards,

Eric

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction..I definitely would like to learn more and improve my knowledge with Linux overall.