Vulnerability Auditing with AuditExpress

AuditExpress 1.3 is a vulnerabilities auditing software by

Altiris, which can audit all hosts on your network. It automatically detects all

machines on the network, and simultaneously audits them for security. It can do

audits for security patches, anti-virus status, personal firewall status,

unauthorized software and hardware and other known vulnerabilities. It comes

with two in-built policies, which can be customized as per your requirements.

Plus, you can also create your own policies. You can schedule Audit Express to

run on a particular system at a particular time. It generates reports for every

audit it does. AuditExpress has both an agent-less and an agent-based option for

auditing Windows, UNIX, and Linux servers and desktops. It's a commercial

package, and we've used the trial version that runs on Windows XP.

You can also use it from our PCQEssential CD this month, and then follow

the steps given below.

To create a new policy for an audit, click on Policies Tab and then click on New button. A new policy appears on policies tab. Click on Save		To edit default policies or already created policies, select the policy that you want to edit, then select the security check categories, which you want to present in the audit
Under security checks you can also choose the content and vulnerabilities that you want to look for in an audit		It can be scheduled to run weekly, monthly. You can define max hours that it can run in each instance
Customize how many simultaneous connections AuditExpress can have in a scheduled audit. Number of re-tries and time difference between them can also be defined		You can choose whether you want to save audit results in default database or in your own database. This database can be on a centralized server for easy management
To audit a system, select the Audit tab, right click on the system. From the menu, click on the 'Audit...'		To view the vulnerabilities discovered, click on the Browse tab. The window will show all discovered vulnerabilities
After scheduling, you can also configure Audit Express to notify you after the audit's completion		To view the report, select the Reports tab and then select the latest audit report. After that, click on 'View Report'

Swapnil Arora