Tenable Blog

Article Title: Navy Fleet Cyber Command Expected to Have Predictive Capabilities Within Two Years

Date: April 6, 2010

Vice Admiral Bernard McCullough, commander of the Navy Fleet Cyber Command, estimates that the command will establish a proactive defense posture by October 2010. Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, McCullough said that the military is traditionally reactive and static, but we need to be proactive, dynamic and predictive. He noted that we have to start seeing the network as a weapons system, and the domain as the battlefield. McCullough acknowledged that transforming perceptions will take time but believes the command will have predictive capabilities within two years...

Reference: Navy cyber leader expects proactive capabilities this year

I like "proactive" - it's a good dynamic buzzword, if you're the kind of person who is impressed by action-y sounding verbs. But "predictive"?

As always we are excited to announce a new release of the Nessus vulnerability scanner. This is a point release (moving from 4.2.1 to 4.2.2) and applies fixes to the scanning engine itself in addition to some of the utilities. The GUI has not been updated in this release, however GUI changes will be implemented and released independently from a point release.

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 30

Announcements

• Several new blog posts have been published this week, including:
  • Plugin Spotlight: SMB Insecurely Configured Service
  • Vulnerability Metrics Webinar - April 28, 2:00 PM EST
• New Nessus training is now being offered at conferences! - The new course titled "Advanced Vulnerability Scanning Techniques Using Nessus" is now being offered at both Black Hat Las Vegas 2010 and BruCon 2010. It's a two-day course that will put students into a real-world environment where they will have to solve problems and identify vulnerabilities using the advanced features of the Nessus vulnerability scanner.
• You can provide feedback to this podcast and all of our social media outlets by visiting our discussions forum and adding messages to the "Tenable Social Media" thread. I would love to hear your feedback, questions, comments and suggestions! I put up a call for ideas on new Nessus videos, so please give us your feedback!
• We're hiring! - Visit the web site for more information about open positions. There are currently 8 open positions listed!
• You can subscribe to the NEW Tenable Network Security Podcast on iTunes! You can also subscribe to the new podcast RSS feed directly.
• Tenable Tweets - You can find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tenablesecurity where we make various announcements, Nessus plugin statistics and more!

Stories

Welcome to the Tenable Network Security Podcast - Episode 29

Announcements

• Several new blog posts have been published this week, including:
  • Using Nessus Thorough Checks for In-depth Audits
  • Vulnerability Metrics Webinar - April 28, 2:00 PM EST
• New Nessus training is now being offered at conferences! - The new course titled "Advanced Vulnerability Scanning Techniques Using Nessus" is now being offered at both Black Hat Las Vegas 2010 and BruCon 2010. It's a two-day course that will put students into a real-world environment where they will have to solve problems and identify vulnerabilities using the advanced features of the Nessus vulnerability scanner.
• You can provide feedback to this podcast and all of our social media outlets by visiting our discussions forum and adding messages to the "Tenable Social Media" thread. I would love to hear your feedback, questions, comments and suggestions! I put up a call for ideas on new Nessus videos, so please give us your feedback!
• We're hiring! - Visit the web site for more information about open positions. There are currently 7 open positions listed!
• You can subscribe to the NEW Tenable Network Security Podcast on iTunes! You can also subscribe to the new podcast RSS feed directly.
• Tenable Tweets - You can find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tenablesecurity where we make various announcements, Nessus plugin statistics and more!

Nessus users have a wide range of powerful options whose functionality is critical to a successful vulnerability scan, but whose meaning may not be completely clear. An example of this is the “Thorough tests” option. There is more to this option than meets the eye and knowing how to properly use it will help you customize your scan policies to your specific needs. By default, this option is disabled; however, of the more than 34,000 plugins available with Nessus, over 900 behave differently if this option is enabled. This blog describes what the feature does and provides some examples of where the option should or should not be used.

The “Thorough tests” option is located in the scan policy “Preferences” section of the Nessus 4.x web interface. Within this section choose the “Plugin” dropdown and select “Global variable settings”:

To use this option, click on the “Thorough tests (slow)” checkbox, which will trigger the “thorough_tests” keyword within the Nessus plugin script files (.nasl). The following sections describe its functionality.