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Welcome to Mark Baggett - In Depth Defense

I am the course Author of SANS SEC573 Automating Information Security with Python. Check back frequently for updated tools and articles related to course material.




Using the free AlienVault.com Nessus feed on your Mac

Tenable has changed their license and you can no longer use their vulnerability feeds for commercial use.   Alienvault.com has a free nessus feed you can subscribe to.  It is available for use here.   You will notice two update programs there.  One for Unix and one for Windows.   What about the MAC?   To subscribe the nessus feeds on your macintosh do this:

1) Download the linux update script.
2) Update it so it works on your MAC as described below.

First, in the "#Plugin dir" section you will need to to change the line that reads:

NVT_DIR="/var/lib/nessus/plugins/"
to 
NVT_DIR="/Library/Nessus/run/lib/nessus/plugins"

3) chmod +x alienvault-feed-sync.sh

If you run the script by typing :

./alienvault-feed-sync.sh  nessus 

you will see an error about not being able to find the command "md5sum".   The nessus feed update did work, but the script was unable to compare the hashes to verify it completed successfully.   That might be good enough for you and you can go about using your updated feeds.   BUT,  I want to see that those hashes match.   Really, it is not buying me much security because I'm downloading the "md5sum" file that I am using for comparison from the same location as the files, but its still a good integrity check.   To fix it, you might waste your time as I did and change "findcmd md5sum" in the update script to "findcmd md5" since MD5 is the name of the MD5SUM utility on OS X.   But if you do you will get the following error:

"Error: md5sums not correct. Your NVT collection might be broken now."

Why?  The version of default version of MD5  that comes with the OS doesn't support the --check (-c) option.    For the file check to work you will want to install the version of md5 that is installed on most linux distributions.  It is called md5sum and it is available for install through fink.   

Happy bug hunting.

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