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You're reading from Security Automation with Ansible 2 Leverage Ansible 2 to automate complex security tasks like application security, network security, and malware analysis

Product type Paperback

Published in Dec 2017

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781788394512

Length 364 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Tools

Ansible

Concepts

Application Security

Authors (2):

Akash Mahajan

MADHU AKULA

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Table of Contents (12) Chapters

Preface

1. Introduction to Ansible Playbooks and Roles FREE CHAPTER

2. Ansible Tower, Jenkins, and Other Automation Tools

3. Setting Up a Hardened WordPress with Encrypted Automated Backups

4. Log Monitoring and Serverless Automated Defense (Elastic Stack in AWS)

5. Automating Web Application Security Testing Using OWASP ZAP

6. Vulnerability Scanning with Nessus

7. Security Hardening for Applications and Networks

8. Continuous Security Scanning for Docker Containers

9. Automating Lab Setups for Forensics Collection and Malware Analysis

10. Writing an Ansible Module for Security Testing

11. Ansible Security Best Practices, References, and Further Reading

Introduction to Nessus

The vulnerability database that Nessus has is its main advantage. While the techniques to understanding which service is running and what version of the software is running the service are known to us, answering the question, "Does this service have a known vulnerability" is the important one. Apart from a regularly updated vulnerability database, Nessus also has information on default credentials found in applications, default paths, and locations. All of this fine-tuned in an easy way to use CLI or web-based tool.

Before diving into how we are going to set up Nessus to perform vulnerability scanning and network scanning against our infrastructure, let's see why we have to set it up and what it will give us in return.

In this chapter, we will focus on doing vulnerability scanning using Nessus. We will try out the standard activities required for that and see what steps are needed to automate them using Ansible: