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Nessus Introduction

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23 views3 pages

Nessus Introduction

Uploaded by

sreeharsha
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Introduction

There are a number of security scanners available. Most are vendor specific and charge
by the number of IP addresses it can scan. The most popular alternative to these
scanners is Nessus.

Nessus is public domain software released under the GPL.

Nessus is designed to automate the testing and discovery of known security problems.

Allowing system administrators to correct problems before they are exploited.

One of the very powerful features of Nessus is its client server technology. Servers can
be placed at various strategic points on a network allowing tests to be conducted from
various points of view.

A central client or multiple distributed clients can control all the servers.

The server portion will run on most any flavor of Unix.

It even runs on MAC OS X and IBM/AIX, but Linux tends to make the installation
simpler. Clients are available for both Windows and UNIX.

These features provide a great deal of flexibility for the penetration tester.

The Nessus server performs the actual testing while the client provides configuration
and reporting functionality.
Features of Nessus

 Up-to-date security vulnerability database


The Nessus security checks database is updated on a daily basis and can
be retrieved with the command nessus-update-plugins. An RSS feed of all
the newest security checks allows you to monitor which plugins are added
and when.
 Remote AND local security.
Nessus 2.1 is the only security scanner that has the ability to detect the
remote flaws of the hosts on your network, but their local flaws and missing
patches as well - whether they are running Windows, Mac OS X or a Unix-
like system.
 Scalable
Nessus has been built so that it can easily scale down to a single CPU
computer with low memory to a quad-CPUs monster with gigabytes of RAM.
The more power you give to Nessus, the quicker it will scan your network.

 Plug-ins
Each security test is written as an external plugin, written in NASL. Each
NASL plugin can be read and modified, to better understand the results of a
Nessus report.

 NASL
The Nessus Security Scanner includes NASL, (Nessus Attack Scripting
Language) a language designed to write security test easily and quickly.

 Smart service recognition


Nessus does not believe that the target hosts will respect the IANA assigned
port numbers. This means that it will recognize a FTP server running on a
non-standard port (ie: 31337), or a web server running on port 8080.

 Multiples services
If a host runs the same service twice or more, Nessus will test all of them.
Believe it or not, several scanners on the market still consider that a host can
only run one server type at once.

 Full SSL support


Nessus has the ability to test SSLized services such as https, smtps, imaps,
and more. You can even supply Nessus with a certificate so that it can
integrates into a PKI-fied environement.
 Non-destructive OR thorough
Nessus gives you the choice between performing a regular non-destructive
security audit on a routinely basis, or to throw everything you can at a remote
host to see how will it withstands attacks from intruders. Many scanners
consider their users to be too inexperienced to make that kind of choice, and
only offer them to perform "safe" checks.

Overview of the Nessus Assessment Process While running Nessus you are doing a
vulnerability assessment (or audit). This assessment involves three distinct phases.

Scanning
In this phase, Nessus probes a range of addresses on a network to determine which
hosts are alive. One type of probing sends ICMP echo requests to find active hosts, but
does not discount hosts that do not respond - they might be behind a firewall. Port-
scanning can determine which hosts are alive and what ports they have open. This
creates a target set of hosts for use in the next step.

Enumeration
In this phase, Nessus probes network services on each host to obtain banners that
contain software and OS version information. Depending on what is being enumerated,
username and password brute-forcing can also take place here.

Vulnerability Detection
Nessus probes remote services according a list of known vulnerabilities such as input
validation, buffer-overflows, improper configuration, and many more.

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