One of the major goals of any IT organizations is to keep their data protected and secured. Ability to find vulnerabilities is also important, as simply scanning the services exposed to the network is not enough. For this purpose, we need to have tools that will help in resolving the network security threats. While ensuring the proper security of Network, three areas need to be considered i.e. analysis of vulnerabilities, configuration as well as the log. In the content, we will be discussing six necessary network tools that every IT organization must have for security purpose.
Among these six network tools, each tool will serve different aspects of security. Vulnerability Scanning Tools helps in analyzing the vulnerability by inspecting all the endpoints & see if it has been configured correctly & securely. Configuration Tools also plays an important role, as its errors will have an impact on availability, performance, and security. And the last part is an analysis of log that will check the patterns in system logs revealing hacking attempts.
Six Necessary Network Tools
- Nmap (Port Scanner): Nmap, also known as Network Mapper is an open source licensed utility used for the purpose of security auditing and network discovery. It uses IP packets to find out the available hosts in the network, services offered by the host, types of packet firewalls that are in use, etc. It is mainly for scanning large networks, but it also works well for single hosts.
- OpenVAS (Vulnerability Scanner): OpenVAS (Open Vulnerability Assessment System) is a collection of tools & services for effective vulnerability scanning & management. Most of OpenVAS products are available for free & their components are licensed under GNU GPL (General Public License).
- Arachni (Web Vulnerability Scanner): It is one of the vulnerability scanning Tools for analyzing the security of web applications & is mainly used by the testers & administrators. Due to its high performance and smart Ruby framework, it is able to evaluate the behavior of web applications at the time of scanning & meta-analysis is carried out thereafter.
- Lynis (Linux Configuration Audit): Made for evaluation of security in Linux or UNIX systems, Lynis is a security Auditing Tool used by security professionals, system administrators & auditing team. The security scan of Lynis is more extensive than vulnerability scanners.
- MBSA (MS Configuration Audit): The Tool is made to determine missing updates and misconfigurations related to security. MBSA stands for Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and it supports almost all versions of Windows. To perform analysis, the tool will scan security updates, service packs as well as update rollups from Microsoft update.
- ELK (Elasticsearch Logstash Kibana): This tool comprises of four components such as Logstash for processing incoming logs, Elasticsearch for storing logs, Kibana to search & visualize logs and Logstash Forwarder for sending the logs to Logstash.
Conclusion
All the mandatory six tools will be used in different sections of network security. Nmap, OpenVAS and Arachni work as a set of tools for vulnerability scanning. For the purpose of configuration analysis, MBSA and Lynis will be used. And lastly, a group of ELK components is used to analyze log & determine uncommon network intrusions.
