Remote Scanning Utilities for Microsoft Hot Fixes and Service Packs

The purpose of this paper is to show how security administration can benefit by the use of six utilities for remote scanning for Microsoft hot fixes and service packs on multiple Windows systems (NT, 2000, XP, IIS 4 and 5, SQL Server 7.0 and 2000, Exchange 5.5 and 2000, Windows Terminal Server, and Windows XP Home Edition). These six utilities are: Baseline Security Analyzer Tool 1.0, HFNetChk (Network Security Hot Fix Checker Tool) Both version 3.32 from Microsoft and version 3.83 from Shavlik Technologies, HFNetChkLT 3.8.96 from Shavlik Technologies, HFNetChkPro 3.8 (Shavlik Network Security Hotfix Checker) from Shavlik Technologies, UpdateEXPERT 3.2 from St. Bernard Software, and LANguard Network Security Scanner 3.0 from GFI. This paper's discussion will illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of each of the six remote scanning tools by using a comparison of the tools. This discussion will consist of two sections. The first section will focus on the first three free tools as regards remote scanning for Microsoft hotfixes and service packs (SPs), while the second section will focus on the four tools that have two common functions: one - remote scanning for hotfixes and SPs, and two - patch pushing.