What the hell is Nessus? Fast overview

Today we will write about Nessus (from my point of view) the best vulnerability scanner.

There are many network scanners:
 * nmap: a very simple command line network scanner.
 * wireshark: a network sniffer, GUI and command line.
 * airodump: wireless scanner.
 * airsnort: an old wireless scanner.


There are many scanners, but none of them gets the level of nessus. This is my favourite one :)
Why?

Nessus is a free vulnerability scanner, you can use it as GUI or command line, no problem.

Nessus works as client <-> server. This is (in short), our nessus server will do the work which we launch from the nessus client.

The GUI client interface is very friendly and easy-to-use.
The command line has a powerful engine that allows us to integrate nessus with metasploit framework (we will talk about metasploit framework in later posts)

Once installed, up and running, we have a "light" version of nessus, it has only a few plugins available.

We have to go to the nessus website and register our nessus. (I asume we are NOT a company, just home users; companies should buy a enterprise version of nessus)

After register our nessus server, we can download all of plugins and full update our nessus engine.
Then we will have our nessus engine ready to run.

Thus, which is the functionality for this plugins?

Plugins are used as working modules, they are used to detect vulnerabilities, each one is dedicated to some type of vuln. Then, you should keep your plugins updated, in order to have the best vuln detection.

Nessus works in a three module manner:

- Policies: policies are used to define the scanner behavior, which IPs will be scanned...
- Scanners: this is the main nessus function, a scanner is a "policy running"
- Reports: a report is created after scanner execution, is the output of the scanner, listing all the vulns detected and the exploit, if it is available.


Those reports can be read by metasploit, to execute commands like "db_autopwn"     :)


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