Posts tagged Vulnerability Management

1 min Networking

Leveraging Security Risk Intelligence to Improve Your Security Posture

As most of you probably know, attackers routinely target exploitable weaknesses of security systems rather than pre-identifying victims for their attacks. Also, most breaches that occur in database security systems are avoidable without expensive or sophisticated countermeasures. In its 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report, Verizon [http://www.verizonbusiness.com/resources/reports/rp_data-breach-investigations-report-2012_en_xg.pdf] registered 174 million compromised records for 2011, compar

1 min Nexpose

How to Check for Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Services

There are many organizations concerned with the critical Microsoft Security Bulletin MS12-020 [http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms12-020] Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) vulnerability. Here is a quick way to check if you have Remote Desktop Protocol running on your system or network. I used NMAP [http://nmap.org/] to check my home network. In the highlighted text below you can see that NMAP can check for the RDP service running. If you can't patch, this is important because at

2 min Metasploit

Getting The Most Out of Metasploit: Pentesting, Password Auditing, and Vulnerability Validation

When we talk to Metasploit users, they usually use it for either penetration testing, password auditing or vulnerability validation, but few use it for more than one of these purposes. By leveraging your investment in Metasploit, you can triple-dip at the same price - no extra licenses needed. Penetration Testing With penetration testing, you can identify issues in your security infrastructure that could lead to a data breach. Weaknesses you can identify include exploitable vulnerabilities, we

2 min Patch Tuesday

October 2011 Patch Tuesday

This month, Microsoft issued eight bulletins, addressing 23 vulnerabilities across Microsoft Windows, Silverlight, .NET and Forefront product lines. Only two bulletins were rated 'critical', and the rest were rated 'important'. In terms of prioritizing patching, when I look at security vulnerabilities, first I want to understand which ones can have the most widespread impact. MS11-081is a cumulative update which affects Internet Explorer, so it relates to both corporate and home users. These v