Week Four Reading, Question, and InTheNews

Week Four Reading:  Mitchel, J. (2002). Proactive Vulnerability Assessments with Nessus, SANS Institute.  Once setup and configured, Nessus is a powerful tool for applying signatures for detecting known vulnerabilities in a computer system.  I found the author’s instruction about saving time with operating systems and databases by proactively setting up the system’s security configuration settings prior to running the first Nessus scan particularly useful: “If you don’t spend the time to properly harden a system before putting it on the network, you’ll spend countless hours tracking down the numerous vulnerabilities that Nessus will detect.”

Question for the class: The article suggests great caution in particular aspects of using Nessus. In which specific ways can Nessus specifically threaten operation of a target computer system being scanned?

News of the Week: Apache Spark Cluster 1.3.X –Arbitrary Code Execution https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/36562/   Apache Spark is an open source cluster computing framework with multi-stage in-memory processing primitives provides performance up to 100 times faster than Hadoop’s two-stage disk-based MapReduce paradigm https://www.sigmoid.com/securing-apache-spark-cluster/.  Spark clusters which are not secured with a proper firewall, however, do not have any authentication mechanism and can be taken over easily.  The exploit described in the Exploit Database articles illustrates how to take over and run arbitrary code over an unprotected cloud-based Apache Spark cluster resource.