Last updated at Mon, 21 Aug 2017 20:15:51 GMT
One of the exciting but challenging aspects of working in the security industry is how quickly things change. You have to protect critical data while physical and virtual devices are coming on and offline, and new threats are announced on a regular basis.
Advanced features in Nexpose are designed to help you respond to these complicated situations. The ability to scan dynamic assets allows you to keep on top of your network even when addresses may be in flux. By scheduling scans, you can use more than one scan template per site, and perform regular scans with no manual effort on your part. Criticality tags help you track your most essential assets amid all the data you receive. This post shows how to access a few of these key features and explains when and why to use them.
Scanning dynamic assets
In some cases, your assets may shift constantly. In the case of virtual or cloud assets, they may come and go or change addresses due to the nature of the environment. In others, you may have a busy office with a lot of employees coming and going, and connecting via virtual private network (VPN).
You can configure Nexpose to keep track of these kinds of constantly changing assets, and scan them on a schedule you specify. For instance, if you have virtual assets, you can create a connection to your vSphere instance, and scan assets discovered through that connection.
Creating multiple schedules
You can create as many automated scheduled scans as you want. One advantage of creating multiple schedules is that you can scan the same site with different templates. For example, you can scan the same set of assets one day with a standard template such as Full Audit without Web Spider, and another day with another type of template, such as a custom template that checks only for certain types of vulnerabilities. One potential use for this feature is to scan your existing sites for newly announced zero-day vulnerabilities.
Tagging all assets in a site
You can apply a tag to all the assets in a site. For instance, if you want to tag all the assets in the site with a Very High criticality tag, you can do that in the site configuration. This is an efficient way to set up tags that can help you with tracking and reporting later.
To learn more about any of these features, see the Nexpose Help or User's Guide.
Shooting gallery photo from jeremyriad via flickr under a Creative Commons attribution license. No changes were made.
