Nessus 3.2 Tutorial Guide
If you're looking for a vulnerability scanner, chances are you've come across a number of expensive commercial products and tools with long lists of features and benefits. Unfortunately, if you're in the same situation as most of us, you simply don't have the budget to implement fancy high-priced systems. You might have considered compromising by turning to free tools like

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nmap. However, you probably saw these tools as a compromise, as their feature sets didn't quite match the commercial offerings.

It's time that you learn how to use Nessus! This free tool offers a surprisingly robust feature-set and is widely supported by the information security community. It doesn't take long between the discovery of a new vulnerability and the posting of an updated script for Nessus to detect it. In fact, Nessus takes advantage of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) architecture that facilitates easy cross-linking between compliant security tools.

The Nessus tool works a little differently than other scanners. Rather than purporting to offer a single, all-encompassing vulnerability database that gets updated regularly, Nessus supports the Nessus Attack Scripting Language (NASL), which allows security professionals to use a simple language to describe individual attacks. Nessus administrators then simply include the NASL descriptions of all desired vulnerabilities to develop their own customized scans.

With the release of Nessus 3 in December 2005, Tenable Network Security Inc., the company behind Nessus, introduced a complete overhaul of the product. The most current version at the time of this writing, Nessus 3.2, was released in March 2008. Nessus is now available for a wide variety of platforms, including Windows, various flavors of Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Mac OS X. Here's an overview of the significant changes in Nessus 3:

  • Nessus is now closed-source. The base product is still available for free. With the introduction of Nessus 3, however, Tenable moved Nessus from an open source to a commercial licensing model. In other words, while the software itself remains free, updated vulnerability information will come with a fee, at least for enterprises (home users may download updates for free). Tenable cites the need to invest in the future of Nessus as the motivation for moving to a proprietary license scheme.
  • Significant speed enhancements. In benchmarking tests performed by Tenable, Nessus 3 scans systems at about twice the speed of Nessus 2. This is due to optimizations in the scan engine and a complete overhaul of NASL.
  • Dramatic reduction in resource requirements. Nessus 3 uses significantly less memory and CPU cycles than Nessus 2, allowing simultaneous scanning of a larger number of hosts.

Nessus uses a modular architecture consisting of centralized servers that conduct scanning and remote clients that allow for administrator interaction. You may deploy Nessus scanning servers at various points within your enterprise and control them from a single client. This allows you to effectively scan segmented networks from multiple vantage points and conduct scans of large networks that require multiple servers running simultaneously.

If you're looking for a robust, inexpensive vulnerability scanning product, definitely take Nessus out for a test drive! The tips in this tutorial will guide you along the way.


NESSUS TUTORIAL

  Introduction: What's new in Nessus 3.2?
  How to install and configure Nessus
  How to run a system scan
  Vulnerability scanning in the enterprise
  How to simplify security scans
  How to use Nessus with the SANS Top 20

This was first published in June 2008