Assessing OS Vulnerabilities
OmniNerd - Articles: 2006 Operating System Vulnerability Summary is reporting a summary of vulnerabilities in popular OSes, including multiple Windows versions and Linux distributions, Mac OS X and Unix platforms. The findings are not surprising, Windows and Mac OS X have more vulnerabilities in default configurations than Linux or Unix platforms.
What is especially helpful about this article is that it provides details of how the vulnerability assessment was done so we can re-run the same tests and verify the relative level of vulnerabilities in our own systems.
The assessment was done with Nessus using the default settings plus the following modifications:
* enabled Nessus SNMP scanner
* enabled SYN scan
* enabled thorough tests with verbosity and false alarm avoidance
* enabled ARP ping
* enabled ICMP ping
* enabled application UDP ping
* enabled ALL plug-ins
* disabled "safe checks"
Its time to see how hardened our platforms are now.
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