Nessus Vulnerability Assessment

Following a rapid generalization, analyze a computer network is a process schematized into three main activities:

• a discovery phase, in which you collect information about the network, its structure and hosts in it;
• vulnerability assessment phase, during which he proceeds to enumerate in detail the operating systems and services on each machine, identifying known vulnerabilities (updated software and / or misconfigured);
• a phase of exploits, where you try to exploit vulnerabilities found to directly verify the impact and criticality of the damage resulting there from.

In the previous article we discussed the first part of this process through the use of Nmap, in this text we aim to present Nessus, a tool to effectively address the assessment phase vulnerabitity.

As always, it should be noted that to carry out an assessment of infrastructure without permission of the owner of the network under consideration, regardless of the purpose "teaching" activity, behavior is a punishable offense. Also note that tools such as Nessus were not developed with the intent to conceal the activities taking place but, in contrast, typically generate hundreds of alarms and logs on the target systems and are therefore easily identifiable.

Prerequisites

This article is aimed at an audience unfamiliar with issues in vulnerability assessment, this premise does not exclude that the reader, to gain maximum benefit from reading, must have a certain familiarity with the principles of operation of a computer network and in particular with the Suite of TCP / IP.

Nessus, Tenable and licenses

Nessus is a project initiated in 1998 by Renaud Deraison in order to provide a vulnerability assessment tool free and open source. Nevertheless Tenable from October 2005, the company that owns the software, modified the terms of the license Nessus transforming into a commercial software with proprietary code. From the ashes of Nessus 2, the last engine was open source software, encountered a number of independent projects including OpenVAS remember.

The change of trade policy implemented by Tenable is reflected in two different types of licenses issued, Home and Professional, and both allow you to access, with different timing, the various software updates and plug-ins but while your license is intended for home use only personal, non-commercial purposes, the Professional license allows the use of software for business purposes.

Despite the diatribes were born following the change of license, Nessus is generally accepted by experts in IT security as one of the best products of its kind and is currently used by major international organizations information security.

Nessus Nessus against

Like any software, now technically mature, many of the changes that have been recently focused on the GUI Nessus. In this sense, the branches 4.2.X 4.4.X and have made significant changes over previous versions. Despite the various measures graphs, these new releases also provide further restrictions for all users of the license Home; Tenable has it locked to 32 the maximum number of IP addresses be scanned simultaneously. This means, for example, scan a class C network requires the user to divide the scan in eight installments, to be executed sequentially.

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