The Sky is falling....... no wait it's not the sky.

Remember my "Pay Close Attention" post a few days ago? I hope you did because obviously I didn't. At least I didn't heed my own advice. Not long ago I had a Pen Test done against my network. I got the report back, looked it over and wrote up a Management report and sent it off to Management (imagine that). I had a few actions items that I needed to address and put them on a to do list and went on with life. Granted life has been VERY busy and since none of the action items were critical they kept getting pushed aside. Well today I made a point to take action on them and fired off a few emails to the proper people to get the issues resolved. That's where the problem (little as it may be) started.

I won't go into specifics but here is the scoop. A issue was identified and the host system was finger printed. If you have ever done a Pen Test or scanned systems to determine the OS you know that it isn't 100% accurate and that is what happened here. The scan came back with it's "best guess" and since it was known that we do have that particular OS and device in use on our network the assumption was made that this was most likely what the device was. This is where I quit paying attention. The emails that I sent were based on the assumption and not the "facts" regarding the type of device. As I started to get feed back from the vendor and one of our engineers I had to do a little more research to get them the answers that they were requesting. That is when I actually paid attention to the IP address that was associated with the device and I realized that it could not be the "assumed" device. Are y'all still following this, it's confusing me.

So since I didn't pay attention at the beginning I had to start back pedaling an trying to explain how I could make such an obvious mistake. Of course Management had also been copied on emails so there was no keeping this just between those in the Network Engineer team. So what can I learn from this? PAY ATTENTION! Things aren't always as they seem. :)