Security Tools News & Tips

Amazon has introduced a new service (limited beta) for it’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) called Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This is an excellent news for many enterprises who’re thinking of cloud but were worried about it’s security. This new service basically allows you to extend your existing IT Infrastructure to the cloud via secure IPSec tunnel.

Here’s all you need to do to get started:

1. Create a VPC. You define your VPC’s private IP address space, which can range from a /28 (16 IPs) up to a /18 (16,384 IPs). You can use any IPv4 address range, including Private Address Spaces identified in RFC 1918 and any other routable IP address block.
2. Partition your VPC’s IP address space into one or more subnets. Multiple subnets in a VPC are arranged in a star topology and enable you to create logically isolated collections of instances. You can create up to 20 Subnets per VPC (you can request more using this form). You can also use this form to request a VPC larger than a /18 or additional EC2 instances for use within your VPC.
3. Create a customer gateway to represent the device (typically a router or a software VPN appliance) anchoring the VPN connection from your network.
4. Create a VPN gateway to represent the AWS end of the VPN connection.
5. Attach the VPN gateway to your VPC.
6. Create a VPN connection between the VPN gateway and the customer gateway.
7. Launch EC2 instances within your VPC using an enhanced form of the Amazon EC2 RunInstances API call or the ec2-run-instances command to specify the VPC and the desired subnet.

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HttpWatch is an HTTP viewer and debugger that integrates with IE and Firefox to provide seamless HTTP and HTTPS monitoring without leaving the browser window. All web applications make extensive use of the HTTP protocol (or HTTPS for secure sites). Even simple web pages require the use of multiple HTTP requests to download HTML, graphics and javascript. The ability to view the HTTP interaction between the browser and web site is crucial to these areas of web development:
• Trouble shooting
• Performance tuning
• Verifying that a site is secure and does not expose sensitive information
HttpWatch has a free basic edition and a professional edition – pricing from $395.

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NS2HTML is a tool created to convert the config file extracted from Netscreen devices into friendly HTML rulebases. It is a free tool developed from the need of gathering data from policies used at ancient firewalls under administration. It is developed under GPL license. It’s totally free, under the license terms.

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AutoScan-Network is a network discovering and managing application. No configuration is required to scan your network. The main goal is to print the list of connected equipments in your network. It’s a free software and can be installed on Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris and Maemo 4.

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Wireshark is the world’s foremost network protocol analyzer, and is the de facto (and often de jure) standard across many industries and educational institutions. Wireshark development thrives thanks to the contributions of networking experts across the globe. It is the continuation of a project that started in 1998. It started as Ethereal but was later re-branded as Wireshark due to trademark issues.

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Cisco IronPort S-Series web security appliances provide a comprehensive and easy-to-use perimeter defense against a broad range of spyware and web-based malware. Robust management and reporting tools deliver ease of administration and complete visibility into threat-related activity. It’s a proxy appliance built on Ironport’s web caching platform based on AsyncOS operating System. It can be configured via command line or graphical UI.

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Sandcat is a feature-rich and advanced web application security scanner. It’s a windows based application which helps to scan emerging Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX, traditional Web technologies, and Web programming languages such as PHP. Sandcat’s fast engine interacts with a truly unique, up-to-date and extremely extensive database of checks and uses sophisticated techniques such as the newly introduced filter evasion and false positive reduction to give you stunning results. Sandcat has a free and pro versions.

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The Blue Coat ProxySG family of appliances delivers a scalable proxy platform architecture to protect Web traffic and accelerate the delivery of business applications. ProxySG is built on SGOS, a custom, object-based operating system that enables flexible policy control over content, users, applications and protocols.
With Blue Coat ProxySG appliances, you can:
• Manage various proxy requirements across a distributed enterprise.
• Protect internal users and networks from spyware and other attacks.
• Significantly reduce bandwidth with leading compression, byte caching and object caching technologies.
• Accelerate application performance for files, email, Web, SSL, and rich media applications.

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Turtle Firewall is a software which allows you to realize a Linux firewall in a simply and fast way. It’s based on Kernel 2.4.x/2.6.x and Iptables. Its way of working is easy to understand: you can define the different firewall elements (zones, hosts, networks) and then set the services you want to enable among the different elements or groups of elements. You can do this simply editing a XML file or using the comfortable web interface Webmin. Turtle Firewall is an Open Source project written using the perl language and realeased under GPL version 2.0 by Andrea Frigido (Frisoft).

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Babel Enterprise is a systems auditing tool. Babel performs a security level check of the machine, or hardening. The check consists of a number of auditing tests that obtain a snap of the security status of each machine. The result is a security index of the system that is given after each execution. Babel Enterprise has a version of its agent for each of the latest Microsoft operating systems, Windows 2003 and Windows XP, and the main Unix system: Solaris 10, AIX 5.x, SUSE GNU/Linux 9 ES and Ubuntu Dapper, although they can be easily adapted to different versions and other UNIX OSs (such as BDS or HP-UX ).

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