Call: +44 (0)1904 557620 Call
Blog

Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

This is the weblog for Pete Finnigan. Pete works in the area of Oracle security and he specialises in auditing Oracle databases for security issues. This weblog is aimed squarely at those interested in the security of their Oracle databases.

[Previous entry: "Two security bugs found and reported to Oracle in 10g Release 2 already!"] [Next entry: "Critical Patch Update July 12 2005 is available"]

A great new free Oracle instance discovery tool - WinSID



I was emailed a few weeks ago by Paul Breniuc who let me know about his new free tool WinSID that can be used to discover Oracle instances. This is a great free tool. The tool does not need an Oracle client and is not a wrapper on top of the Oracle client. It can be used to interrogate the Oracle listener to display information about remote (and local) listeners - For instance services, SID, listener statistics on established connections. The Paul's main page for this tool is titled "WinSID (free) - Oracle instance discovery tools" and it gives some details of the tool and also some graphics of it in use. A great feature is the fact that a working TNSNAMES.ORA connection string is stored in the Windows clipboard. As I said the tool does not use Oracle libraries / OCI etc. It uses native network calls to send packets to the listener in similar manner to http://www.jammed.com/~jwa/hacks/security/tnscmd/ - (broken link) tnscmd I assume. The free version does not support all listener commands, the Pro version does. The free version does not support TNSPings but Paul has a free TNSPinger for this - It doesn't look like it has been released yet.

The WinSID tool is available for free download from Paul's site and there is also a professional version WinSID Pro that can scan complete networks looking for Oracle listeners. The free version of WinSID Oracle instance recovery tool is available here.

I have included the tool in the free section of my Oracle security tools page and I must apologise to Paul for not adding it sooner as he emailed me a few weeks ago.