Luke Youngblood writes:

>One of the real issues I face is a loss of credibility with other 
>departments in the company that I'm responsible for scanning.  All it takes

>is one small outage caused by a Nessus scan and now I'm responsible and the

>other department is understandably paranoid about being scanned again.

Exactly! It is very hard to explain to non-technical decision makers,
customers, etc. that some unknown tool (Nessus) is in the right and their
2-3 year old network device that has never given them troubles has troubles.

I'm working with another client today and made sure we do a MAC-by-MAC
inventory prior to running any scans. I'd have to believe other Nessus users
in non-enterprise land (e.g. small banks) may have to take things from the
bottom up as well. It'll take two additional days of assessment time for
them, but we'll go into a scan with much better preparation. I've used a
checklist for each connected device to have the client sign off that it has
been backed up and/or configuration documented in the event the scan causes
difficulties. I see four old HP Jet Direct servers and per Sonny's comment,
I'm halfway expecting a surprise. 

>The list you suggest would be helpful in my environment too.

Is this something the Nessus folks would be interested in maintaining (I'd
prefer to not re-invent any wheels as I've got enough F/OSS projects I've
signed onto already). Sonny's comment about recovery steps and/or
work-arounds might be something definitely worth including in any such
database; e.g. is this just a hard boot recovery or is the configuration
usually lost.

Jamie





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