Book Description

Digitization drives technology today, which is why it’s so important for organizations to design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities is one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure.

This Learning Path begins by introducing you to the various concepts of network security assessment, workflows, and architectures. You will learn to employ open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning and use these results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. With a firm understanding of the basics, you will then explore how to use Nessus and Nmap to scan your network for vulnerabilities and open ports and gain back door entry into a network. As you progress through the chapters, you will gain insights into how to carry out various key scanning tasks, including firewall detection, OS detection, and access management to detect vulnerabilities in your network.

By the end of this Learning Path, you will be familiar with the tools you need for network scanning and techniques for vulnerability scanning and network protection.

This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books:

Network Scanning Cookbook by Sairam Jetty
Network Vulnerability Assessment by Sagar Rahalkar

Table of Contents

1: Introduction to Network Vulnerability Scanning
2: Understanding Network Scanning Tools
3: Port Scanning
4: Vulnerability Scanning
5: Configuration Audits
6: Report Analysis and Confirmation
7: Understanding the Customization and Optimization of Nessus and Nmap
8: Network Scanning for IoT, SCADA/ICS
9: Vulnerability Management Governance
10: Setting Up the Assessment Environment
11: Security Assessment Prerequisites
12: Information Gathering
13: Enumeration and Vulnerability Assessment
14: Gaining Network Access
15: Assessing Web Application Security
16: Privilege Escalation
17: Maintaining Access and Clearing Tracks
18: Vulnerability Scoring
19: Threat Modeling
20: Patching and Security Hardening
21: Vulnerability Reporting and Metrics

What You Will Learn

Explore various standards and frameworks for vulnerability assessments and penetration testing
Gain insight into vulnerability scoring and reporting
Discover the importance of patching and security hardening
Develop metrics to measure the success of a vulnerability management program
Perform configuration audits for various platforms using Nessus
Write custom Nessus and Nmap scripts on your own
Install and configure Nmap and Nessus in your network infrastructure
Perform host discovery to identify network device