NTA Monitor

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Will IE6 be the next NT4?

1st October 2009 All penetration testers will remember the long tail of Windows NT 4.0, and how this operating system continued to be used long past the point when security updates stopped at the end of 2004. For many years the presence of an unpatchable NT4 server was a common issue in a penetration test report, and it is only now, almost five years after security support ended, that finding an NT4 system on a network is becoming a rare event. Read More

One in four web applications susceptible to high risk security flaws

7th September 2009 NTA Monitor has reported a 10% increase in the total number of web applications found to have at least one high-risk security issue... Read More

Organisations facing a changing threat landscape

20th July 2009 According to NTA Monitor's 2009 Annual Security Report, the average number of Internet security vulnerabilities is on the rise... Read More

The Return of the Insider Threat

1st July 2009 When NTA started security testing twelve years ago, the main focus was on the insider threat. There were many reports with statistics showing that most security breaches were due to insiders. By contrast there was very little focus on the external threat via Internet and third-party network links. Back then many companies did not even have a firewall. Read More

Firewall-1 Vendor ID Fingerprinting Glossary

Aggressive Mode	One of the modes used by IKE in Phase-1 to establish an authenticated key exchange (the other mode is Main Mode).
Big Endian	A byte ordering where the most significant byte is stored at the lowest address (first). This is the same as the "network byte order" used by TCP/IP.
Hybrid Authentication	An IKE authentication method supported by Checkpoint Firewall-1 4.1 and later. Defined in draft-ietf-ipsec-isakmp-hybrid-auth-05.txt "A Hybrid Authentication Mode for IKE".
IKE	Internet Key Exchange. The key exchange and authentication protocol used by IPsec. Defined in RFC 2409.
IPsec	Internet Protocol Security. The IPsec protocol is used to create VPNs. It uses the IKE protocol for key exchange and authentication.
ISAKMP	Internet Security Association and Key Management Protocol. ISAKMP provides the framework for key exchange and authentication that is used by IKE. ISAKMP is defined in RFC 2408.
Main Mode	One of the modes used by IKE in Phase-1 (the first phase of the IKE packet exchange) to establish an authenticated key exchange (the other mode is Aggressive Mode).
NG	Next Generation, the current major version of Checkpoint Firewall-1.
RSA Authentication	An IKE authentication method using RSA public key encryption.
SA	Security Association.
SHA1	Secure Hash Algorithm 1. A message digest (hash) function defined in RFC 3174.
Vendor ID	An ISAKMP payload which contains a vendor-defined constant.
VPN	Virtual Private Network.