Summary

This chapter provided an overview of the Cisco Secure Scanner. Network scanning is a very important part of the security policy for your organization; you may spend thousands of dollars on equipment and resources to protect your network. Network scanning provides an opportunity to test the effectiveness of these measures. Regular scanning of the network, especially after an updated NSDB containing new vulnerabilities is released, is important as an ongoing task to ensure that the network is secure from all threats.

The network scanner can be used not only in checking network security, but also in application testing to ensure that specific machines are listening for traffic on specific ports. This alternate use of the network scanner is one that the author has implemented numerous times.