Leading e-security expert offers affordable vulnerability assessment

E-security distributor AfricaSD today announced a 50% discount on its Vulnerability Scanning Assessment Solution valid until 31 September 2007. To make use of this offer, please register on www.africasd.com.

It is crucial for any company to perform a vulnerability scan to highlight potential methods that a hacker might use to attack it. By analysing the operating system and the applications running on your network, possible security holes are identified.

In other words, it plays the devil's advocate and alerts you to weaknesses before a hacker can find them, enabling you to deal with these issues before a hacker can exploit them.

Event assessment will be performed on event log-based intrusion detection and network-wide event log archives and analyses of the event logs of all network machines and alerts.

Your entire network will be scanned, IP by IP, to provide information regarding the service pack level of the machine, missing security patches, wireless access points, USB devices, open shares, open ports, services/applications active on the computer, key registry entries, weak passports, users and groups, as well as other aspects of your network. These results will be presented in two formats; a management report, as well as a technical report (which explains the findings in a technical format and the measures that must be taken to fix the vulnerabilities).

The Network Assessment will also include:

* Network Architecture Review & Recommendation
* External Network Security Assessment (Public Network)
* Internal Network Security Assessment (Private Network)
* Patch Management
* Virus Management
* Change Control
* Mail and Web Policies Control

For the past several years, the number of vulnerabilities reported annually has increased exponentially. This trend is expected to increase for two reasons: 1) more people are relying on the Internet for their personal and business activities, and 2) security threats are increasing, such as:

* New-age virus threats that take advantage of operating systems that are not properly patched;
* Viruses being camouflaged through clever but destructive e-mails;
* Hacker information that is freely available;
* Powerful "hacker software" that is easily available;
* Advanced technology such as spoofing, Trojans and denial-of-service attacks that are causing havoc and headaches with no end in sight; and
* Lack of bandwidth, disk space and employee productivity that are raiding company profits due to uncontrollable spam.

Most of the above security threats are being made possible by vulnerabilities existing in operating systems, software applications and firewalls. This is giving rise to a couple of challenges currently facing most companies:

* They know they have security threats but just don't know where these threats are coming from.
* Why should a company implement an e-security solution when it doesn't even know what its vulnerabilities are?

AfricaSD says it has recognised these challenges, which is another reason why it is now offering organisations this advanced vulnerability scanning assessment.

"This assessment only provides information of an organisation's current vulnerabilities. How the organisation chooses to deal with that information is based upon their e-security policy," says Moolman. "Obviously, AfricaSD provides only the best-of-breed products and solutions to almost all of the vulnerabilities our scanning assessment uncovers," says Moolman.

Should you require some more information about this priceless service, please visit http://www.africasd.com/services/services.php.