An exposure to Nessus vulnerability scan

What is Nessus?

Nessus is a platform developed by Tenable that scans for security vulnerabilities in devices, applications, operating systems, cloud services and other network resources. It is maintained by Tenable with free version - Nessus Essentials. Nessus Essentials has a limit to 16 IPs Addresses that can be used for vulnerability scans. This article will introduce how to do vulnerability scan with Nessus Essentials.

Vulnerability scan with Nessus

Firstly, we need to download Nessus.

During downloading, we can sign up and apply for a license.

After downloading, we can install Nessus in the terminal.

After installing, a local register is needed.

Finally, we can create a new scan.

In the new scan, we need firstly set the IP address.

The scanned ports can be assigned. Here we choose to scall all ports.

The possible useful credential can be set for different authentification (SSL, windows, etc.)

After the scanning, we can read the report. We can searh keywords in the report. For example, “SMB share”.

Vulnerabilities found are also listed.

We can also export the report in other forms, e.g., pdf for small size reports, csv for large size reports.