Auditing and Finding Virtual Machines using Nessus

I was speaking with an attendee at the Mid Atlantic IANS Forum, and they had an issue tracking new virtual servers that were "popping up" all over their enterprise. They had a secondary problem in that many of these new OSes weren't properly licensed as they were all installed off of the same ISO. This blog entry discusses discovery of VMware systems with active and passive methods.

Nessus 3 can help very much with this issue. Consider these two plugins:

#20094 VMWare Host - The first plugin primarily detects Windows systems that are running on VMware. This is accomplished through the MAC address which can be obtained without credentials simply by asking the Windows server. If UNIX credentials are used on the host, the MAC address is also saved. And lastly, for either UNIX or Windows hosts, if Nessus and the target host are in the same collision domain, the MAC address will also be obtained. Once the MAC address is obtained, it is compared to a list of known VMware addresses.

#24273 Remote Copy of Windows Not Activated - The second plugin is purely for Windows. It requires credentials and WMI access. It performs a check to see if the running copy of Windows has been activated or not. If your organization is running unauthorized or unlicensed copies of various Windows operating systems, this plugin will determine it. It may also indicate that a system has been installed but not fully configured.