WebTrends Security Analyzer
By John N. Stewart
I've decided that 24 hours a day just isn't enough. In the constant effort to keep up to date on security matters, getting behind by just one day in email forces another late night trying to catch up.
And the Internet never sleeps.
As a security-conscious systems and network administrator with an ever-growing number of systems, networks, applications, and users, I'm finding that the number of exploits and programs to test exploits is becoming an unmanageable problem. From this side of the keyboard, the picture presents a large number of:
- systems and routers;
- applications on systems;
- users on systems;
- changes to systems;
- exploits to test for once, and then test for again during regression testing.
Every 24 hours, the job requires reading emails from security lists by the hundreds and visiting Web sites for software by the dozens. Armed with the latest information about the most current security problems, we have to find time to engineer solutions to those problems.
There are some viable products for automating host- and systems-checking in a scalable form. One is WebTrends Security Analyzer v2.1, available for download at www.webtrends.com (see also "
Product Information".
Security Analyzer is a Windows-based application that acts as a security scanner. Once the application is launched, you (the Analyzer administrator) can set up which hosts are scanned, scan those hosts by pointing and clicking, or configure automatic scans with Analyzer's scheduler for hands-off scanning through.
