Vulnerability Assessment: Protecting Your Organisation

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Course Overview

Security professionals are faced with a growing number of alerts, intrusions and incident reports. Knowledge of vulnerability assessment and hacking techniques allows you to proactively detect vulnerabilities before your networks are attacked.

In this course, you learn to configure and use vulnerability scanners to detect weaknesses and prevent network exploitation. You acquire the knowledge to assess the risk to your enterprise from an array of vulnerabilities and to minimise your exposure to costly threats.

Audience

This course is valuable for auditors, firewall/IDS personnel, network managers and others involved in securing enterprise systems. Experience with network security at the level of Course 468, " Introduction to System and Network Security ", is assumed. A working knowledge of TCP/IP is also assumed.

Skills Gained

• Detect and respond to vulnerabilities that put your organisation at risk using scanners
• Employ real-world exploits and evaluate their effect on your systems
• Configure vulnerability scanners
• Analyse the results of vulnerability scans
• Assess vulnerability alerts and advisories
• Establish a strategy for vulnerability management

Course Outline

Fundamentals

Introduction

• Defining vulnerability, exploit, threat and risk
• Identifying the goals of assessments
• Creating a vulnerability report
• Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) list

Scanning and exploits

• Vulnerability detection methods
• Types of scanners
• Port scanning and OS fingerprinting
• Enumerating targets
• Types of exploits: worm, spyware, backdoor, rootkits, Denial of Service (DoS)
• Deploying exploit frameworks

Analysing Vulnerabilities and Exploits

Uncovering infrastructure vulnerabilities

• Scanning the infrastructure
• Flooding and bandwidth attacks
• ARP poisoning
• Defeating switches

Attacks against firewalls and IDS

• Firewall weaknesses
• Attacking IDS: Snort buffer overflow

Exposing server vulnerabilities

• Scanning servers
• Canonicalisation and privilege escalation
• Performing buffer overflow and input validation attacks
• SQL injection
• Corrupting memory with format string errors

Revealing desktop vulnerabilities

• Scanning for desktop vulnerabilities
• Cross-site scripting (XSS) and cookie theft
• Client buffer overflows (WMF attack)
• Silent downloading: spyware and adware
• Attacking alternate browsers: firelinking

Configuring Scanners and Generating Reports

Scanner operations and configuration

• Choosing credentials, ports and dangerous tests
• Identifying dependencies
• Preventing false negatives

Creating and interpreting reports

• Filtering and customising reports
• Interpreting differential reports
• Contrasting the results of different scanners

Assessing Risks in a Changing Environment

Researching alert information

• National Vulnerability Database (NVD)
• Evaluating security alerts and advisories
• Determining vulnerability severity
• Employing the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)

Identifying factors that affect risk

• Evaluating the impact of a successful attack
• Calculating vulnerability severity
• Weighing important risk factors
• Performing a risk assessment

Managing Vulnerabilities

The vulnerability management cycle

• Applying a vulnerability process
• Standardising scanning with Open Vulnerability Assessment Language (OVAL)
• Patch and configuration management

Vulnerability controversies

• Rewards for vulnerability discovery
• Bounties on hackers
• Legal issues and disclosure

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