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Sourcefire^® Vulnerability Assessment

Operating system and application vendors announce vulnerabilities almost daily. And when vulnerabilities are announced, patches usually are not far behind. Today, IT is overwhelmed with the sheer volume of patches it must deploy week after week. Although the use of automated patch management solutions helps, it is a challenge to have an up-to-date inventory of assets on your network, much less which assets are affected by a given vulnerability.

Sourcefire offers two approaches to vulnerability assessment (VA)—“passive” monitoring, through its Sourcefire RNA™ product, and “active” scanning, through Nessus. When used together, both approaches provide complete threat, endpoint and network intelligence for cataloging network assets and uncovering endpoint vulnerabilities.

Sourcefire RNA (Real-time Network Awareness) provides “always-on” passive network monitoring of network assets. Rather than actively scanning assets, RNA passively “listens” to traffic on the network, creating a network map of hosts and enumerating inherent vulnerabilities. Although RNA is always working, it cannot provide the same “deep” level of detail that an active scanner can.

Nessus is the world’s most popular open-source VA technology. Included and integrated with Sourcefire Defense Center , Sourcefire customers can launch periodic Nessus scans (usually during non-peak hours) to provide a complete inventory of endpoint assets and vulnerabilities. Although Nessus provides deep scans of endpoints, it is not as “real time” as RNA.

Both Sourcefire RNA and Nessus include up-to-date vulnerability databases. By using both Sourcefire RNA and Nessus in concert with each other, Sourcefire customers can:

• Be alerted when new assets appear on the network
• Gain a complete inventory of hosts and host attributes
• Identify which hosts are susceptible to a given vulnerability
• Harden network assets by working with leading third-party patch management tools