SECURITY PENETRATION TESTING Are Your Computer Secure Enough Now ?

Saving Hard Money with the Nmap OSFS

Nmap OS fingerprinting can also assist your IT budget by providing important details on operating systems in the enterprise and making it much easier to keep your licenses and related contracts in order.

For example, you may think you have 142 SQL servers on your network, when in reality; Bob's engineering team stopped using SQL databases 6 months ago. They did not inform you or your team of the changes. Their team previously accounted for 126 of those 142 total SQL databases. Lucky for you, you're not relying on Bob's good intentions to have your budgets and account payables in order. An Nmap OSFS of Bob's subnet tells you that they are actually only using 97 SQL databases now. That's a difference of 29 SQL databases and quite a savings when it comes down to the licensing. It is often quite difficult for the IT department to justify itself because of its inability to provide a positive cash flow for the organization. This method and approach to proactive savings will give you ability and credibility to justify your resource requirements and cost adjustments.

Another scenario that could be posed to the administrator is the task of finding all the computers across the network that are still using Windows 2000, and decommission them. At one point during the deployment of these systems, the organization had a restructure that required a few labs to switch around and expand or contract causing general mayhem in your otherwise well-documented and structured IT world. On top of it, two of the labs decided to trade some hardware with one another. All a savvy administrator needs to do in this situation is use Nmap and its OS fingerprinting capabilities. You can then take the results and parse them for IP addresses corresponding to the Windows 2000 signature. After you have your list of IP addresses, you can search through them against your network file to find their corresponding VLANs and subnets. This would then tell you the switch the machines are physically attached to, which should tell you a very close approximation to where they potentially sit.

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