Plugging the Holes

Tom knew that he needed to assess his network for security holes and figure out where the intruders were getting in. Even though the firewall was now protecting the internal workstations from random incursions, the public servers, such as Web and mail, were still vulnerable to attack. His firewall was also now a target, so he needed a way to ensure it was secure from all attacks. He installed a program called Bastille Linux on his firewall server to make sure it was configured securely (Chapter 2). He then ran a program called Nmap from both outside and inside his network (Chapter 4). This reported what application ports were "visible" from the outside on all his public IP addresses. The internal scan let him know if there were any unusual or unnecessary services running on his internal machines.

Next, he used a program called Nessus to scan the network from the outside and inside again (Chapter 5). This program went much deeper than Nmap, actually checking the open ports for a large number of possible security issues and letting him know if machines were improperly configured on his internal network. The Nessus program created reports showing him where there were security holes on the Web and mail servers and gave him detailed instructions on how to fix them. He used these reports to resolve the issues and then ran the Nessus program again to make sure he had eliminated the problems.