Securing Network Infrastructure: Discover practical network security with Nmap and Nessus 7

A basic corporate network typically consists of endpoints such as desktops/laptops, servers, security devices such as Firewall, proxy, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and network devices such as hubs, switches, and routers. Most of the time, these are acquired from various vendors, thus they are susceptible to different attacks, and expose the network to a larger attack surface. These components can be attacked by a hacker using publicly available exploits or a zero-day vulnerability to gain access to the device/machine with a possibility of gaining access to a different device/machine in the network or whole network itself. Note the following diagram to illustrate this:

A vulnerability is a weakness present in a system or device that is exposed to a possibility of being attacked. Network Vulnerability Scanning is a process of looking into identifying and detecting vulnerabilities in the network components such as clients, servers, network devices, and endpoints, using various automated or manual tools and techniques. It can be broadly classified into two types: internal network vulnerability scan and external network vulnerability scan.

The internal and external vulnerability scans share a similar process, but differ in the network placement of the scan appliance or the system. An external vulnerability scan has a scope to identify loopholes with a perspective of the attacker being over the internet and targeting the network through public IP addresses of the network, whereas an internal vulnerability scan operates considering the attacker to be an insider with access to the internal network and targeting the network through private IP addresses. Identifying both internal and external threats is very important for any computer network, to create a real-time picture of how secure the network is, based on the number of vulnerabilities identified.

The vulnerability scans have their own side effects on the networks, such as an increase in network latency caused by the increase in traffic, unresponsive network resources, and rebooting of devices and servers. Thus, all internal network scans within the organization should be performed with the utmost care and proper approvals. In general, there are two types of scanning techniques that can be used, authenticated and unauthenticated. We will see the recipes for these scan types in Chapter 4, Vulnerability Scanning, and Chapter 5, Configuration Audit.

Beginners always confuse the Vulnerability Scan with the penetration test. The Vulnerability Scan is a preliminary step to identify the hosts on which you can perform a penetration test. For example, as a part of a vulnerability scan you identify that port 80 is open on a server and is susceptible to Remote Code Execution (RCE) attacks. For a penetration test, this information will be input as you already know that the server is vulnerable to RCE and will try to perform the attack and compromise the server.

We will have a look at many recipes in further chapters of this course to understand the various best practices to be followed during a Network Vulnerability Scan.

Flow of procedures

The activity of a Network Vulnerability Scan can be divided into three phases:

• Discovery
• Port scanning
• Vulnerability scanning

Discovery

Discovery, also known as Host Discovery, is a process to enumerate live hosts and is a very important component of the reconnaissance phase of a security testing activity. This will help you to eliminate the unwanted hosts from the list of targets, thus it will allow you to use these enumerated hosts to perform targeted scans and penetration tests.  Some of the tools that can be used to perform Network Discovery are Nmap, Nessus, OpenVas, and Wireshark.

The following screenshot shows a sample host scanned using Nmap for Discovery. It shows that the host is up, thus we can determine the host is live:

These tools come in handy if the ping is disabled across the network. I always prefer using Nmap over other tools because of its ease of use and the Nmap Script Engine (NSE), which allows the user to write and implement custom scripts. We will be discussing NSE in coming chapters.

In this course, we will further introduce you to various recipes on how to perform host discovery manually and using tools.

Port scanning

In this phase, we will perform detection of the ports open for a specific host based on the communication between the host on that port to your machine. This technique helps to determine whether a particular port is open or closed. This technique differs from protocol to protocol. For example, for TCP, the communication and the pattern to conclude a port to be open is different when compared to UDP. Some of the tools that can be used to perform port scanning are Nmap, Nessus, OpenVas, and Wireshark.

The following screenshot shows a sample host scanned using Nmap for port 80. The screenshot shows that the host is up and port 80 with state as open, thus we can determine the host is live. These tools come in handy if the ping is disabled across the network:

In this course, we will further introduce you to various recipes on how to perform port scanning manually and using tools.

Vulnerability scanning

Once the open ports are identified on the discovered live hosts, we can perform vulnerability scanning. A vulnerability scan detects and identifies known issues of the software and tools installed on a host such as older version of software in use, vulnerable protocols enabled, and default passwords. It is difficult to perform this activity manually; hence this phase needs to be performed using automated tools that identify the open ports and try various exploits on the ports to identify whether the particular process/software using the port is vulnerable to the exploit based on the process. Some of the tools used to perform vulnerability scanning are Nessus, OpenVas, and Qualys.

The following screenshot shows a sample host scanned for vulnerabilities using OpenVas. You can see that the output shows the list of vulnerabilities the host is affected:

In this course, we will further introduce you to various recipes on how to scan a host for vulnerabilities using Nessus, and how to customize these scans to obtain specific and fewer false-positive results.

As mentioned in the earlier sections of the chapter, the major advantage of performing a Network Vulnerability Scan is to understand the security posture of the network. The result of a Network Vulnerability Scan provides a bundle of information useful to both administrators and penetration testers, such as the following:

The Network Vulnerability Scan allows the identification of unnecessary ports that are open and the services running on these ports. For example, an application/web server in a demilitarized zone does not require TCP port 22 to be open and exposed to the internet. These unwanted ports make the host/device susceptible to attacks. Most of the scanners, when identifying a login interface to any of the hosted services, try to log in using a preexisting database of usernames and passwords, and provide a report of all the default usernames and passwords, the use of which can compromise the service.

A credentialed patch scan can reveal details about missing patches and updates for a variety of supported platforms. This information is critical as most of these missing patches have exploits available over the internet, which can be made use of to reproduce similar attacks on the network. This might also reveal various missing patches in the third-party tools installed on the machines of the network. This information helps an attacker to target these tools to exploit and obtain access to the nodes or, sometimes, even the entire network.

A Network Vulnerability Scan also highlights various vulnerable protocols used within the network or on the nodes. For example, if a server is running an SMB share supporting the SMBv1 protocol, it will be highlighted as vulnerability with an above moderate risk rating as SMBv1 is vulnerable to various known malware attacks. Also, a scan highlights the vulnerable ciphers and authentication methods used by the services running which are susceptible to known Man-in-the-Middle attacks. For example, if a web server is using basic authentication over HTTP protocol, it is vulnerable to expose user credentials when a Man-in-the-Middle attack is performed on the network.

Most of the vulnerability scanners, both open source and paid software, provide attack-related exploit information as a part of the description of the vulnerability. This will make the life of the attacker and the penetration tester easy by providing direct links either to the method of exploitation or the exploit code itself.

The following screenshot provides links to documents providing information about the vulnerability reported by the scanner:

Along with the previous technical use cases, a network vulnerability also has various uses from an organization's perspective, such as the following:

Today's network environments have a complex structure consisting of firewalls, DMZ, and network devices such as switches and routers. These devices consist of complex access lists and virtual network configurations, which makes it difficult to generalize any activity. A shift in any of the preceding configurations could result in a change of the architecture of the whole network.

If we are looking to perform an IP-based scan on any of the network components, we have to be sure that all the data packets generated are reaching the destination intact and are not being impacted by any of the devices or solutions in between. For example, if Alice is scanning Bob's computer over the network and both of them are separated by a firewall, where Bob's subnet is configured to be in WAN Ping Block Mode as a part of which ping packets will be identified and dropped at the firewall level, Alice's host discovery scans for Bob's computer will result in a false positive that machine is not live.

In order to perform a successful security profiling using a Network Vulnerability Scan, the following factors need to be considered:

Once a Network Vulnerability Scan report is obtained, it is important to devise a mitigation plan to mitigate all the vulnerabilities highlighted as part of the report. The following are a few solutions that can be part of the Network Security Scan report:

The report needs to be compiled based on the findings, and tasks are to be assigned to the respective departments. For example, all the Windows-related vulnerabilities are to be mitigated by the respective team that is responsible for maintaining Windows machines. Once the responsibilities have been sorted across the teams, the teams are expected to perform an impact and feasibility analysis on the solution provided in the report. The teams have to check the solutions against the security objectives, confidentiality, integrity, and availability. These mitigations can be used as a baseline to create hardening documents, including any other available baselines in public or private domains.

Once the solutions have been implemented on the affected hosts, it is important for the team to include these recommended remediations into the existing policies in order to avoid misconfiguration in the future. These policies are to be updated from time to time in order to be in line with the current security standards.

Any organization or individual needs to comply and create a cycle of the following activities to achieve its information security objective:

A vulnerability assessment as mentioned previously will result in all the open gaps present in the network, after which mitigation analysis is required to understand the remediations that must be implemented and also to perform a feasibility check on whether it would have any impact on the continuity of the network components. Once all the remediations have been identified, implement the remediations and jump to step 1. This cycle, if performed quarterly, could ensure maximum protection to your network.  

To conclude, a Network Vulnerability Scan is a three-phase process including discovery, port scanning, and vulnerability scanning. This, if performed correctly, will help an organization to identify its current security posture and create actionable solutions in order to improve this posture. We have seen the steps to plan a Network Vulnerability Scan in this chapter and the various factors that are involved. In further chapters, we will look into the tutorials on how to perform this Network Vulnerability Scan to identify the vulnerabilities and act on them.