assuria bulletin 62

assuria auditor in 2007

In 2007 Assuria have delivered a significant number of updates and enhancements to Assuria Auditor. Many of the updates and enhancements have been “under the covers” and not always visible to users.

Assuria continues to invest in and enhance Assuria Auditor. All Users are requested / invited to submit enhancement requests for Assuria Auditor and Assuria Log Manager to info@assuria.com.

For more information on any of the features mentioned in this document please contact Assuria.

Additional agents delivered

Additional platform coverage delivered through existing agents

Updated agent installers

Security Content updates

Assuria has added and updated 771 checks during 2007. This new Security and Updated content has been delivered for the following platforms:

Agent	Total Checks
IBM AIX 4.3.3 / 5L	95
HP-UX 11 on PA-RISC	64
HP-UX 11 on IA-64	32
HP-UX 10.20	6
Red Hat Enterprise Linux	277
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on X86	25
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on X86	26
Solaris8	30
Solaris9	28
Solaris10 on SPARC	41
Windows 2000	71
Windows 2003	76
TOTAL	771

Note that these are the numbers of new and updated checks delivered through the AutoUpdate program, and do not include checks delivered as part of the installation package for the new agents described above

New / Updated features

Item

Description

New Agent Management dashboard.

A dashboard that can be viewed at the enterprise or class level, including ’10 Most Vulnerable Agents’, ‘Vulnerabilities per Operating System’, ‘Agent Population by Class’, ‘Agent AutoUpdate Levels’, and ‘Agent Poll Time’.

Global policy variable configuration

Allows common policy variable to be easily changed and implemented, for example ‘password length’ or ‘password age’.

Updated password checks for Solaris and HP

Allows checking of global password properties, as well as those applying to individual user accounts.

Import of remote not connected agents results files

Intended for use by traveling auditors or those Assuria Auditor users who may have some agents that cannot connect directly to the Console. Once imported all of the features of Assuria Auditor are available to process and report the Results.

Re-instated OS2 and POSIX checks on Win2k3 as requested by a customer.

Checks were removed as believed to be redundant – now re-instated.

External Standards based reporting:

Full release of the new standards based reporting functionality and other reporting updates. Standards supported includes ISO 27002 (17799), ISO 27001, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI), Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) and FISMA.

CVSS – Common Vulnerability Scoring System, v2.

CVSS scoring V2 fully implemented and available in all reports. For more information on CVSS please see http://www.first.org/cvss/cvss-guide.html.

Expandable HTML Reporting

New HTML reporting format with compressed reporting that can be expanded to several levels on viewing.

Assuria Web Interface (Assuria VITA)

Updated version (4.2.8) of the Assuria Auditor web interface. New features includes user roles and privileges. Previously known as VISTA now renamed VITA to avoid possible confusion..

4.2.8 Console Build and XPU consolidation

Updated and consolidated Assuria Auditor Console build.

Systems Inventory checks:

New checks and policy to report on the current system inventory covering hardware, software, services and port.

Agent Service Pack

New Service Pack for Windows agent which brings a newly installed Windows agent to a later level with a single update..

Active Alerting

Reinstatement of console support for active alerting. On Windows platforms Assuria Auditor can alert in real-time on specific events being written to the Windows event logs.

‘Logging’ Checks

Variants of file baseline checks, which log change information to the Windows ‘event log’ or ‘syslog’.

XP Support

Enables the Windows 2000 agent to be correctly supported by the Assuria Auditor Console.

Improved Error Reporting

Database schema and console changes to provide improved error reporting in the event of scan errors.

Agent Return Communications Diagnostic

Diagnostic available for use in investigating a class of network mis-configurations that prevent agent to console communications.

Improved Exception Configuration

Ability to set exception configuration by copying the configuration of a ‘reference’ agent.

Extended AutoUpdate Integrity Checking

Extension of this feature to Windows 2000, HP-UX 11 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux agents.

Bug fixes and minor enhancements

A number of minor bugs and small enhancements have been made during 2007.