Questions: nmap, nessus unreliability, setting up a packet capture box, using Impacket

From: Paul Johnston (paul@westpoint.ltd.uk)
Date: Thu Apr 22 2004 - 11:07:18 EDT


Hi,

1) How reliable have people here found nmap and nessus to be? I have
encountered (rare) cases of nmap not finding ports, and also of nessus
not identifying ports during the find_service stage. We hear a lot about
false positives, but it's much harder to notice false negatives.
Anything that can be done about this?

2) I'm looking at setting up a box to capture all traffic on our
scanning network. Does anyone have thoughts on doing this, based on
their operational experiences?

3) Using Core Impact's Impacket library, how can you get it to calculate
UDP or TCP checksums correctly? No matter what I do they won't come out
right. It works fine for ICMP. While I'm on the subject, what do people
use for raw packet libraries? I really like scapy for interactive use,
but it seems a bit heavyweight for use in scripts.

Regards,

Paul

-- 
Paul Johnston
Internet Security Specialist
Westpoint Limited
Albion Wharf, 19 Albion Street,
Manchester, M1 5LN
England
Tel: +44 (0)161 237 1028
Fax: +44 (0)161 237 1031
email: paul@westpoint.ltd.uk
web: www.westpoint.ltd.uk
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