So for that matter, we will not be evaluating various products against each other. However, this text can serve as a baseline to do just that. It might be a moot point for most security aware people, but it is useful to point out why security scanning is necessary. People might assume that computer systems have a least a basic level of security when they come out of the box. In general, this is unfortunately not the case.
Systems normally come installed with lots of default permissions and running services.
From a security point of view, this is very bad. Computer systems are not secure out of the box. In fact, most break-ins can probably be attributed to improper default system settings. It requires a security-aware system administrator to check and modify these system settings to provide a fairly decent level of system security. In a lot of companies the IT department is understaffed and security comes in the last place, so this almost never gets done.