Black Hat Briefings, Las Vegas 2005 [audio] Presentations From The Security Conference

An enterprise IT infrastructure is a complex and a dynamic environment that is generally described as a black hole by its IT managers. The knowledge about an enterprise network's layout (topology), resources (availability and usage), elements residing on the network (devices, applications, their properties and the interdependencies among them) as well as the ability to maintain this knowledge up-to-date, are all of critical for managing and securing IT assets and resources. Unfortunately, the current available network discovery technologies (active network discovery and passive network discovery) suffer from numerous technological weaknesses which prevent them from providing with complete and accurate information about an enterprise IT infrastructure. Their ability to keep track of changes is unsatisfactory at best. The inability to "know" the network directly results with the inability to manage and secure the network in an appropriate manner. This is since it is impossible to manage or to defend something,