NT/2000 Security Tool Kit on A Budget

In this time of shrinking IT budgets and doing more with less the cost of purchasing a commercial vulnerability scanning tool can cost several thousands of dollars. With Internet facing servers it is imperative to know if there are any vulnerabilities that can be exploited. To the rescue of under budgeted and over worked systems administrators comes freeware based security tools that are as good or even better than the equivalent commercial Internet security tools. This paper will focus on the shareware, freeware and low cost commercial security tools that I have found useful and have used to solve security issues in the organization I presently work in. The following brief list is by no means all-inclusive as the environment I presently work in is almost exclusively Microsoft based with NT 4.0 as the primary operating system. Many of these security tools are direct ports from the Unix/Linux world.