Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer

Security of your computer is one of the most overlooked needs. Often users will update their computer and often don't realize that updates may indicate they are up-to-date but are not.

Microsoft's utility Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer is a graphical user interface that uses the NetBIOS ports 138 and 139 to scan your network for vulnerabilities. MBSA can also scan your local computer to find critical, missed updates, service packs and password information.

MBSA automatically assesses these missing security updates and vulnerabilities on computers producing a report in HTML format for you to evaluate.

The scanning requires that the user be an administrator of the local machine and the network computers.The user friendly interface is self explanatory. With few options, a home user can easily scan their computer with little or no training. The software is powerful enough to scan small businesses or enterprises.

As shown in the picture above, local scanning uses the NetBIOS name of the computer or the given IP address (local loopback of 127.0.0.1) can be used.

Vulnerabilites that can be checked include:

Windows Administrative

Weak Passwords

IIS

Security Updates

SQL

The picture below shows network scanning which allows for a range of IP address to be evaluated. This method of scanning supports all three classes in networking (A, B, and C subnets).

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer is the perfect tool to check out any Microsoft Windows' computer security vulnerabilities. With version 2.1 and full Vista compatibility, MBSA supports more operating systems and scans for more vulnerabilities than most open source programs. With its support of multiple flavors of windows, users should run this free assessment tool to help protect their data against hackers.

MBSA Download

MBSA Information Version 2.1 on Technet

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