Nessus is a proprietary comprehensive vulnerability scanning tool. It is free of charge for personal use in a non-enterprise environment. Its goal is to detect potential vulnerabilities on the tested systems. Tanable Network Security announced the release of Nessus 4.2.0 last month. Nessus is now using a web based interface to manage scans and their results.

The Nessus vulnerability scanner, is the world-leader in active scanners, featuring high speed discovery, configuration auditing, asset profiling, sensitive data discovery and vulnerability analysis of your security posture. Nessus scanners can be distributed throughout an entire enterprise, inside DMZs, and across physically separate networks.

"THE more things change, the more they stay the same," claims one of our readers, who prefers to remain anonymous. "Got .Nessus in your country's infrastructure?" is the question he asks when suggesting that Microsoft is trying to poison the GNU/Linux operating system so as to gain more control over it because Free software takes over at the expense of Microsoft.

Protecting servers by placing them behind a firewall is a best-practice methodology for systems administrators, but it's not a panacea: those systems are still visible to network scanners such as nmap and nessus.

Pentoo Linux is a Gentoo-based Linux distribution that runs as a Live CD or Live USB. Pentoo has been designed to provide a penetration testing and security assessment solution through the use of Nessus and Metasploit. Pentoo uses the Enlightenment window manager, is optimized for Pentium III architecture, and supports package modularity like Slax.

In a previous article Linux-Tip explained how to install the current release (Backtrack 3 Final) in a virtual environment using VMWare. The goal was to run Backtrack 3 from the hard disk connected to a Wireless USB Adapter and to use the tool Kismet. It further explains how to collect valid wireless networks and to display them on Google Earth’s worldwide map system.

The Conficker worm has infected several million computers since it first started spreading in late 2008. In this paper German developers presented several potential methods to repel Conficker. The approaches presented take advantage of the way Conficker patches infected systems, which can be used to remotely detect a compromised system.

We wrote about installing OpenOffice 3.2 in Ubuntu from it's official website but that's not the same OpenOffice.org as the one in the Ubuntu repositories because Ubuntu uses Go-OO, an optimized version of OpenOffice. Well, here is how to install this optimized version called Go-OO.

There have been proposed quite a few themes for Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 and if you want to install them all in Ubuntu Jaunty for instance, you can just do:

sudo apt-get install community-themes