Vulnerability Assessment Training: Protecting Your Organisation

Vulnerability Assessment Course Outline

• Fundamentals

  Introduction

  • Defining vulnerability, exploit, threat and risk
  • Creating a vulnerability report
  • Conducting an initial scan
  • Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) list

  Scanning and exploits

  • Vulnerability detection methods
  • Types of scanners
  • Port scanning and OS fingerprinting
  • Enumerating targets to test information leakage
  • Types of exploits: worm, spyware, backdoor, rootkits, Denial of Service (DoS)
  • Deploying exploit frameworks

• Analysing Vulnerabilities and Exploits

  Uncovering infrastructure vulnerabilities

  • Uncovering switch weaknesses
  • Vulnerabilities in infrastructure support servers
  • Network management tool attacks

  Attacks against analyzers and IDS

  • Identifying Snort IDS bypass attacks
  • Corrupting memory and causing Denial of Service

  Exposing server vulnerabilities

  • Scanning servers: assessing vulnerabilities on your network
  • Uploading rogue scripts and file inclusion
  • Catching input validation errors
  • Performing buffer overflow attacks
  • SQL injection
  • Cross–Site Scripting (XSS) and cookie theft

  Revealing desktop vulnerabilities

  • Scanning for desktop vulnerabilities
  • Client buffer overflows
  • Silent downloading: spyware and adware
  • Identifying design errors

• Configuring Scanners and Generating Reports

  Implementing scanner operations and configuration

  • Choosing credentials, ports and dangerous tests
  • Preventing false negatives
  • Creating custom vulnerability tests
  • Customising Nessus scans
  • Handling false positives

  Creating and interpreting reports

  • Filtering and customising reports
  • Interpreting complex reports
  • Contrasting the results of different scanners

• Assessing Risks in a Changing Environment

  Researching alert information

  • Using the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) to find relevant vulnerability and patch information
  • Evaluating and investigating security alerts and advisories
  • Employing the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)

  Identifying factors that affect risk

  • Evaluating the impact of a successful attack
  • Determining vulnerability frequency
  • Calculating vulnerability severity
  • Weighing important risk factors
  • Performing a risk assessment

• Managing Vulnerabilities

  The vulnerability management cycle

  • Standardising scanning with Open Vulnerability Assessment Language (OVAL)
  • Patch and configuration management
  • Analysing the vulnerability management process

  Vulnerability controversies

  • Rewards for vulnerability discovery
  • Markets for bugs and exploits
  • Challenge programs