Tenable Blog

In my last post, I gave some reasons why your board of directors and senior management need to be involved in your security efforts. But obtaining and maintaining an acceptable or reasonable security posture requires effective security governance. Let’s look at how you assemble the most effective strategies and techniques to gain and maintain that support.

The best way to test for the Shellshock vulnerability is to do a credentialed local check against the Unix/Linux distribution. Nessus contains a number of plugins that make sure the operating system is patched. Nessus also has a plugin that performs a local test by invoking Bash, which covers just about any Unix/Linux platform available.

With Tenable’s Nessus, security and compliance teams can audit and inventory devices and software to identify what is malicious, abnormal or out-of-compliance. However, do you ever need to pinpoint the offending system or software to its user?

At Tenable, we’ve heard from customers who are looking for a unified framework that enables multi-vendor, cross-platform network system collaboration among IT infrastructure, network policy, identity and access management, and other IT operations.

A critical vulnerability in bash (Bourne Again SHell) versions through 4.3, the default shell for many Linux and other Unix distributions (including Mac OS X), presents a critical security concern for network-attached devices that use bash, especially those with an attack vector that can be exploited remotely (e.g., web servers, SSH servers, and likely much more). The key focus is that the attacker has to have a remote interface that will call bash to exploit the vulnerability. The bigger concern is that in the Unix world, that includes a lot of services.

The Payment Card Industry has been shaken recently by numerous breaches that have successfully exploited malware on Point-of Sale (POS) systems to steal payment card data at retailers of all sizes around the country. Backoff and BlackPOS are two of the latest variations of memory scraping malware that targets POS systems and is responsible for the theft of cardholder data in over 1,000 organizations in the U.S. alone.