Ron Gula

Last week I had my annual physical, with the goal of checking the big things—heart, cholesterol, blood pressure. I also had an ache in my foot that had caused me some trouble running, but which I had largely ignored. My doctor recommended a foot x-ray. The diagnosis--a bone fracture.

If you have not heard the news yet, Brian Krebs has reported that the recent Target breach occurred when hackers broke into the network of a company that managed the company's heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.

Nessus will generate a finding if the scan target has an Anti-Virus agent deployed with the virus detection rules out of date. We've often received feature requests asking us to allow customers to set a grace period (in days) to avoid generating this alert. Such a preference was added this week under the heading 'Antivirus Software Check':

The security researchers at Errata Security performed an Internet-wide port 22 scan to gather SSH daemon banner information. The scan happened on September 12th from 71.6.151.167 with a tool named masscan. If you run a SIM, a network IDS or any type of passive network monitoring, this is a really easy and safe "known" to go and see if your monitoring is configured correctly. It is the proverbial “shooting fish in a barrel” example where you can show that your network security monitoring is in fact working.

The new PVS 4.0 annual subscription makes network monitoring available to a wide variety of security practitioners. This is a new type of product, and it has many highly-practical use cases. Read about several ways you can get your security work done quicker with PVS 4.0.