Re: ISS Internet Scanner Cannot be relied upon for conclusive

From: Ulf Munkedal (munkedal@N-M.COM)
Date: Wed Feb 10 1999 - 14:13:22 PST

  • Next message: Huger, Alfred: "Re: ISS Internet Scanner Cannot be relied upon for conclusive Aud"

    Interesting discussion but everyone seems to be missing the basic point
    here. The point lies in the question: "what is the exact passed/failed
    criteria for each test?". An elementary part of any QA testing.
    
    If the passed/failed criteria is not know then it's _very_ difficult to use
    the result. And this is a basic problem with a lot of security scanners out
    there today, including the Internet Scanner. What exactly is the criteria
    for stating a vulnerability as found or not found? All vendors could do a
    far better job on documenting this.
    
    We use a lot of tools (commercial, expoits, scripts etc) and have written a
    lot of our own stuff. And very often teh problem with any tool boils down
    to the passed/failed criteria for each test executed by that specific tool.
    E.g. of the more than 1500 vulnerabilities we have found on over 400
    systems we have tested so far we have found 36% of all the vulnerabilities
    manually. The tools were only able to find 64% of them... An important
    reason for this is lack of correct or even just documented passed/failed
    criteria. Simple but true.
    
    Ulf
    ---
    Ulf Munkedal
    Partner
    Neupart & Munkedal
    http://www.n-m.com
    Tel +45 7020 6565
    Fax +45 7020 6065
    Public PGP Key: http://www.n-m.com/pgp/
    ---
    SecureTest
    - Vished for Internet-sikkerhed
    



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