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Spotlight
A Cheapskate's Guide to Free Security Software
8/8/2008
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1. Nessus
Nessus, the world's leading vulnerability scanner, was my respondents' top choice. What does it do? Nessus starts by doing a port scan either with internal portscanners or an external scanner such as NMAP to find out which ports are open and then tries various attacks on the open ports. Quoting from their product literature, Nessus features "high speed discovery, configuration auditing, asset profiling, sensitive data discovery and vulnerability analysis of your security posture. Nessus scanners can be distributed throughout an entire enterprise, inside DMZs, and across physically separate networks."
Nessus was created by Renaun Deraison in 1998 and until 2005 was open source software. The Nessus 3 engine, now based on proprietary code, is still available to everyone free of charge, but the cost of the plugins is a little more complicated.
In 2008, Tenable Network Security, the company that owns the software, divided users into two categories, "home users" and "commercial users." For home users, which includes personal and non-profit users, Nessus launched "Homefeed" to provide the plugins at no charge. For individuals and organizations that want to use Tenable's Nessus plugins commercially, they created "ProfessionalFeed" that provides subscribers the latest vulnerability and patch audits, configuration and content audits, and commercial support for an annual fee.
2. NMAP
NMAP, a port scanner, was up there with Nessus on my respondents' most popular list. NMAP, which stands for "Network Mapper," is available for free under a GNU General Public License (GPL) and is used for network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. It looks at raw IP packets to determine what hosts are available, what operating system they are running, what applications they are offering, and what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use--and lots of other good stuff.
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