Since we're waxing poetic about scanning mistakes, I know of a certain
individual >cough< who pointed a scan at their K12 school district, and
messed up such that the tool recursed up the DNS tree and hit all the
K12 sites in his state (or at least all of those until it was noticed
and turned off). That was back in the way early days of Nessus.
Another good lesson, don't just press the button and leave for the night
:)
FWIW, I put together what I thought at the time was a reasonable list of
things that a person should know about Nessus, but it was just an
outline, and no actual training info. Its at
http://lachniet.com/lpi/Nessus.htm. A person could start researching
these items till they understood them all to get a start at learning the
tool.
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: nessus-bounces@list.nessus.org
[mailto:nessus-bounces@list.nessus.org] On Behalf Of George A. Theall
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2005 3:18 PM
To: nessus@list.nessus.org
Subject: Re: how to learn nessus - reg
On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 08:47:30AM -0700, uber haxor wrote:
Also remember these
tools have a purpose. It was a two million dollar outage that I was
troubleshooting for ten hours because our Information
Assurance Green
Team set Nessus to run automated and had their flags wrong.
The result
was a DoS from the inside of the network, and with all the
disinformation that we received, it took way too long to figure it
out.
Amen to that!
In an earlier life, I administered a mission-critical mail
system for a hospital that crashed several times because, we
later found out, the security administrator was playing
around with nmap! The problem wasn't with nmap per se but
with the vendor's poorly designed TCP/IP stack -- any scanner
would have caused it to crash.
I suppose you could think of scanner as a chef's knife -- if
you're not careful, you can hurt yourself really badly; but
in the hands of a skilled chef, it can produce some terrifc results.
George
--
theall@tenablesecurity.com
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