Infection Monkey Vulnerability Scanner with Daniel Goldberg

Summary

How secure are your servers? The best way to be sure that your systems aren’t being compromised is to do it yourself. In this episode Daniel Goldberg explains how you can use his project Infection Monkey to run a scan of your infrastructure to find and fix the vulnerabilities that can be taken advantage of. He also discusses his reasons for building it in Python, how it compares to other security scanners, and how you can get involved to keep making it better.

Preface

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• Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Daniel Goldberg about Infection Monkey, an open source system breach simulation tool for evaluating the security of your network

Interview

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python?
• What is infection monkey and what was the reason for building it?
  • What was the reasoning for building it in Python?
  • If you were to start over today what would you do differently?



• Penetration testing is typically an endeavor that requires a significant amount of knowledge and experience of security practices. What have been some of the most difficult aspects of building an automated vulnerability testing system?
  • How does a deployed instance keep up to date with recent exploits and attack vectors?



• How does Infection Monkey compare to other tools such as Nessus and Nexpose?


• What are some examples of the types of vulnerabilities that can be discovered by Infection Monkey?


• What kinds of information can Infection Monkey discover during a scan?
  • How does that information get reported to the user?
  • How much security experience is necessary to understand and address the findings in a given report generated from a scan?



• What techniques do you use to ensure that the simulated compromises can be safely reverted?


• What are some aspects of network security and system vulnerabilities that Infection Monkey is unable to detect and/or analyze?


• For someone who is interested in using Infection Monkey what are the steps involved in getting it set up?
  • What is the workflow for running a scan?
  • Is Infection Monkey intended to be run continuously, or only with the interaction of an operator?



• What are your plans for the future of Infection Monkey?

Keep In Touch

• danielguardicore on GitHub
• Guardicore Blog

Picks

• Tobias
  • Darkest Hour



• Daniel
  • How Complex Systems Fail

Links

• Infection Monkey
• Guardicore
• Stack Overflow
• Metasploit
• AsyncIO
• React
• Nessus
• Nexpose
• Shellshock
• Wannacry
• Simian Army
• Chaos Engineering
• Capuchin Monkey
• Google Summer of Code

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA