Nmap
Find the alternatives: CIS-CAT auditing tool
Sometimes time or money is limited. We hunt to find great alternatives to commercial solutions. This time alternatives for the CIS auditing tool CIS-CAT.
Summary
The Center for Internet Security, CIS for short, is the organization behind several in-depth hardening guides. The quality of these hardening guides is outstanding, with a high level of detail. This high level of detail has one downside: it costs a lot of time to read, try and test the recommendations. Sometimes we simply don’t have the time to do an extensive audit by hand. Let alone the time to actually repeat the auditing and hardening steps on a regular basis.
Linux host discovery with Nmap
For auditing purposes we can perform Linux host discovery with the famous Nmap tool.
Summary
Not everyone has the budget to buy an expensive software suite to do host discovery on the network. Fortunately there are some great open source alternatives. By combining the right tools we can discover hosts and filter the ones we are looking for. In this article we have the goal to determine what systems on our network are running Linux. Of course it is easy to swap out some pieces in the examples to do the same for Windows, Mac OS or BSDs.