Nessus is the industry’s most widely used vulnerability scanner that helps reduce the attack area and ensures compatibility in physical, virtual, mobile, and cloud environments. Nessus provides quick resource research, configuration auditing, goal profiling, malware detection, sensitive data, and more.

Nessus supports more technology than competing solutions, scans operating systems, network devices, hypervisors, databases, web servers, and sensitive infrastructure for vulnerabilities, threats, and compliance breaches.

With the world’s largest, constantly updated vulnerability and configuration library, and backed by a team of Tenable experts on vulnerability testing, Nessus is the standard for speed and precision in vulnerability scanning.

Nessus Professional - screen

Nessus allows the user to sort and filter the results using more than 20 different criteria. Violence severity ratings can be tailored to the needs, and a summary of recommended preventive measures can serve as evidence for various types of disputes.

Full coverage of compliance:

  • Virtualization and clouds
  • Malicious software and botnets
  • Configuration audits
  • Web applications

Key benefits:

  • Reduces the number of potential attacks: It prevents attacks by identifying vulnerabilities that should be eliminated
  • Versatile: Complies with regulatory standards and compliance requirements to the widest extent possible
  • Scalable: starting with a single license for Nessus Professional user to Nessus Manager or Nessus Cloud, if required by growing requirements for managing vulnerabilities.
  • Low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): A complete solution for scanning vulnerabilities at low cost
  • Constantly Upgrading: Tenable Research Team Continues to Provide Updates
  • Easy access: browser access anytime and anywhere

Advantages of Nessus

Reporting and monitoring

  • Reporting flexibility: Customizing reports according to vulnerability or device, ability to generate executive summary, or comparing different scan results to highlight changes.
    – Standard (XML), PDF (requires Java installation on Nessus server), HTML and CSV formats.
  • Targeted scan results email notifications, recommendations for corrective actions, and scans configuration improvements.

Scanning capabilities

  • Detection: Precise, high-speed detection of resources
  • Scanning: vulnerability scanning (including IPv4 / IPv6 / hybrid networks)
    – Detect vulnerability without authentication
    – Authentication scanning to seal systems and detect missing patches
  • Scope: a wide range of resources and profiling capabilities
    – Network devices: firewalls / routers / switches (Juniper, Check Point, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks), printers, network drives
    – Offline configuration auditing of network devices
    – Virtualization: VMware ESX, ESXi, vSphere, vCenter, Microsoft, Hyper-V, and Citrix Xen Server
    – Operating Systems: Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Cisco IOS, IBM iSeries
    – Databases: Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, Informix / DRDA, PostgreSQL, MongoDB
    – Web applications: servers and web services, OWASP vulnerabilities
    – Cloud: Scan application and instance configurations in clouds such as Salesforce and AWS
    – Compliance: takes into account the requirements of government offices and corporate requirements
    – Helps meet PCI DSS requirements by configuring auditing and scanning web applications
  • Threats: botnets / harmful processes / audit of anti-virus systems
    – Finding viruses, malware, vulnerabilities, communicating devices with infected systems, known / unknown processes, malicious web sites
    – Audit compliance with: FFIEC, FISMA, CyberScope, GLBA, HIPAA / HITECH, NERC, PCI, SCAP, SOX, GIODO (developed by OpenBIZ)
    – Audit Configuration: CERT, CIS, COBIT / ITIL, DISA STIGs, FDCC, ISO, NIST, NSA
  • Auditing of industrial automation systems: SCADA systems, embedded devices and ICS applications
  • Sensitive content audit: personal information (eg payment card numbers, PESEL, etc.)

Implementation and management

  • Flexibility of implementation: Software, hardware, virtual device can be run on the company’s premises or in the cloud of the service provider.
  • Scanning options: both types of scans: remote scanning without authentication and authentication – local scans for deeper and more detailed analysis of resources connected to the network, temporarily disconnected or remotely accessible.
  • Configuration / Scan Policy: predefined policies and configuration patterns.
  • Risk Assessment: A CVSS vulnerability assessment, five severity levels (Critical, High, Medium, Low, Informational), to adjust the risk assessment perspective, it is possible to adjust severity ratings.
  • Prioritization: Correlation with data from exploit bases (Metasploit, CoreImpact, Canvas, ExploitHub) and filter
  • Extensibility: Integrate Nessus with existing RESTful API support paths.

Training and certification

Tenable offers training for new users who want to acquire the knowledge and skills to maximize the benefits of the product. For advanced users, training on specific topics, such as compliance audits. Training is available on request through the Tenable website.

Nessus – higher level

For organizations that want to manage team susceptibility, the following Nessus solutions are available:

Nessus Manager

Nessus Manager provides collaboration and centralized management through the use of multiple scanners. Involve the process of managing system and network administrators, investigators and response groups, risk and compliance, and user support. The industry’s most widely used vulnerability scanner and resource configuration assessment offers role-based sharing of scanners, policies, schedules and results to an unlimited number of authorized users.

Nessus Cloud

The Tenable version of Nessus Manager, which is available on the server, allows you to scan, share and access multi-user access controls from a remote cloud solution. Nessus Cloud can also be used to meet PCI quarterly network scanning requirements that should be performed by an outside company. Nessus Cloud is a PCI-certified solution as an Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV).

Nessus benefits

Customers choose Nessus due to:

  • Highly accurate scan with rare false positive results
  • Features and functionality of comprehensive scanning
  • Scalability to hundreds of thousands of systems
  • Easy to implement and maintain
  • Low management and usage costs

Source: openbiz.pl