Version 8 of GFI’s popular LANguard Network Security Scanner (NSS 8) is a feature-rich and easy-to-use package for keeping Windows and Linux system defences up to date.

This latest edition has a host of new features designed to counter security threats to mainstream software packages such as Windows Vista, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007. There is also a rejigged user interface, Unicode support and a new graphical threat level indicator that displays vulnerability levels for particular computers or defined groups of computers.

Another major addition is support for the Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (Oval), a security standard developed by the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (Cert) for promoting publicly available security information. Support for Oval means NSS 8 can trawl the security threats listed on Cert’s Oval web site in order to pinpoint potential system vulnerabilities.

We tested NSS 8 on both Windows XP Professional and Vista systems and found it easy to install and manage. It provided up-to-date and useful security information that would help system administrators to maintain any Windows and Linux systems and also to refine desktop operating system images, especially Windows Vista, before deployment.

The database used for storing scan results can be either Microsoft Access or SQL Server 2000, or the freely distributable Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine, (MSDE 2000).

We could scan any system or groups of systems that could be contacted through our Extreme Summit X150 switch. In our test, we targeted a system on the same subnet as the system running NSS 8, and than specified a number of scan profiles. We could let NSS 8 scan for missing service packs and critical patches or we could just get it to scan for any open ports present on the target system.

Details of detected flaws and problems on scanned systems are displayed clearly, but the NSS 8 requires an add-on reporting package to produce reports.

A scan of a Dell Precision M50 notebook revealing all vulnerabilities and patching status took just three and a half minutes. The scan revealed the latest patch from Microsoft, MS07-042, was missing and also warned us that NTLM authentication should be used rather than LM Hash for logging onto the system. The fact that CD/DVD autorun was enabled was flagged up as a high security flaw, because of the potential for CDs and DVDs to install hidden software that could compromise firms’ systems. The flaws revealed by the scan were all documented neatly, with links and helpful information on why NSS 8 had flagged the problem.