VM-Aware

I was wondering if there’s a GUI that sits on top of iptables to make creation of lengthy firewall policies a bit more straightforward and it turns out there most certainly is.  fwbuilder.org have written a magnificent multi-platform tool that presents a GUI to not only iptables, but PIX, FWSM, ipfilter & more.

You can download the installers for Windows, Mac & Linux as well as some extra modules here.

It really does work a charm.

A blog at the Washington Post offers some little tidbits on how to make your websites more secure.

You can read the post here, bear in mind that it is totally IIS focussed, but pretty useful nonetheless.

I was looking for an app that would investigate an ESX host that wasn’t configured by me to see how much work would be needed to secure it.

I found Tripwire’s ConfigCheck java app an absolute cracker.  As Michael Parkinson would say its simplicity is its genius.

Provide hostname, username and password and wait for a minute or so for ConfigCheck to analyse the security of the host.  A list of all the areas checked is displayed with either a pass or a fail.

This is all great, but what is even better is the fact that upon completion of the tests you are offered the opportunity to download a remediation document.  This 52 page document outlines why a particular test failed and how to fix the problem.

You can download ConfigCheck here, and the remediation guide here.

Another great post on the VMware Security Blog has outlined some of the best practices associated with isolating all VMotion traffic.

This was born out of an exploit being found that allows a hacker to take control of a mid-migration Virtual Machine.

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