Monitoring Internet-facing Servers with SecurityCenter & Nessus
by Paul Asadoorian on May 4, 2012
Covering All Your Bases
Internet-facing servers are a popular attack target: They are accessible to everyone on the Internet and can easily be probed for vulnerabilities. Based on exposure alone, Internet-facing servers present a higher risk of becoming compromised. This risk needs to be mitigated if organizations must provide access to services such as web, mail, and VPN connectivity. It is therefore important that these servers are regularly assessed for potential vulnerabilities (and more important that something is done to remediate the vulnerabilities). This blog entry provides guidance for some basic security issues which are important to monitor on Internet-facing servers, such as:
- Maintaining Patches - It is important to keep up-to-date with patches in general, and with systems that are exposed to the Internet, fixing both local and remote vulnerabilities are particularly important. For example, a web server may contain a vulnerability which allows an attacker to gain a shell with the privileges of the running user (e.g., www-data). If local vulnerabilities are present, the web server vulnerability can quickly lead to the attacker gaining root-level privileges. With this level of access, attackers have a much better chance to cover their tracks and hide their presence within the system. Therefore, ensuring all available security patches are installed on your systems is important.
Easily Exploitable Web Application Vulnerabilities - If you've ever monitored the logs of an Internet-facing web server, you know attacks against applications are frequent. Application testing involves many different processes and techniques, but you don't want to give attackers any low-hanging fruit. It is important to test your applications before they are put in production, but also continue to monitor for vulnerabilities in production. Several automated tools in use by attackers exploit flaws, such as SQL injection, on a regular basis. Once the application is on your production system, it is important to regularly assess it to stay ahead of the curve and remediate the vulnerabilities before attackers get to them.
Exposed Services - Internet-facing servers ideally offer a limited number of services, since they do not need to support a wide range of services that an internal development server would offer. This makes it easier to scan and identify vulnerabilities and detect any new services which may crop up. Firewalls are often deployed to provide an extra layer of protection for systems exposed to the Internet and ensure that only required services are permitted. Scanning these hosts on a regular basis will quickly identify any new services that are running or mistakes made in firewall configuration which may unintentionally expose an internal service or server.