SCADA Checks For Nessus 3

We announced a partnership with Digital Bond to have Nessus checks developed to test a variety of SCADA protocols and devices today. You may remember from our previous announcement that we released several dozen Passive Vulnerability Scanner SCADA signatures based on Digital Bond's public snort IDS signatures.

These PVS rules were very popular with our customers in the power and manufacturing industries which led us to put together the paper "Protecting Critical Infrastructures - SCADA Network Security Monitoring". This paper outlined some of the real and perceived risks to performing security, and showed how following the Department of Energy's 21 steps for securing SCADA networks can be accomplished with Tenable solutions.

It seems that although the security teams of most companies with SCADA networks are just as up on the issues as any other vertical, the folks who actually run the SCADA network are often resistant to any outside monitoring. With one or more PVS sensors, some of our customers are getting a first real automated look at their SCADA networks. We're hoping to let them expand that monitoring later this year with actual active probes for Nessus that understand SCADA. 

So what will the work with Digital Bond result in? Here is a short list:

• non-destructive SCADA probes to identify SCADA applications
• vulnerability audits to identify SCADA devices with missing patches
• these checks will be available to any Nessus user subscribed to the Direct Feed and to all Security Center customers
• the checks will only work with Nessus 3

We expect to have initial SCADA checks for Nessus ready by November. In the mean time, if you are interested in SCADA security, I recommend that you subscribe to Digital Bond's BLOG, as well as review Tenable's SCADA paper mentioned above.