Nmap getting SNORTed

Open source innovator and SNORT creator, Sourcefire, Inc., and Insecure.Org, the creator of the Nmap Security Scanner, today announced a licensing agreement for the parties to jointly develop open source vulnerability scanning technology based on the general purpose Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) embedded within the Nmap network discovery tool.

Under the agreement, Insecure.Org will develop the engine while the Sourcefire Vulnerability Research Team (VRT) will develop and contribute plug-ins for discovering specific vulnerabilities.

Tags: Nmap, Snort,

Snort vulnerability found

On Monday, Sourcefire — the company behind the open-source intrusion-detection application Snort — said that hackers could potentially execute malicious code on a system running Snort and gain access to confidential data.

The vulnerability was reported to Sourcefire by Internet Security Systems (ISS), the security arm of IBM.

Full story on ZDNet UK

Tags: ISS, security, Snort, Sourcefire,

How To: Sniffing the Air

The nice thing about wireless LANs is that you don't have to be physically connected to use them. But that strength also opens the door to security problems. Derek Boiko-Weyrauch shows you how a popular open source tool can be used to keep tabs on WLAN activity.

Tags: How To, security, sniff, Snort, WiFi,