Tag Archives: Nessus

Retrieving scan results through Nessus API

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Retrieving scan results through Nessus API. In this first article about Nessus API I want to describe process of getting scan results from Nessus.

Of course, it’s also great to create and run scans or even create policies via API. But to be honest, in practice, you may need this functionality rarely. And it’s easier to do it manually in GUI. On the other hand, sometimes it very efficient to create automatically some specific scan task for specific group of hosts using existing (inventory) scan results. But we will talk about this topic next time (Upd. I wrote post about scan creation “Nessus API for hosts scanning“).

Nessus API

Now, imagine that we have configured regular Nessus scans. And we want to get this scan results on a regular basis to make some analysis and maybe create some tickets in Jira.

As usual, I will use curl for all examples, because it is easy to read and easy to test in any Linux terminal.

Starting from Nessus v.6 the API manual is built in GUI: https://<scanner_ip>:8834/api#
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Tenable Nessus: registration, installation, scanning and reporting

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Tenable Nessus: registration, installation, scanning and reporting. It’s a bit strange that I wrote in this blog about some relatively exotic vulnerability management solutions and not about the one I use every day. It is, of course, Nessus. The legend of vulnerability scanners. It would be fair to say that Nessus has become a synonym for vulnerability scan itself as Xerox for photocopy. First version of Nessus was developed by Renaud Deraison in 1998 as a free and open-source product. In October 2005 the license was changed to proprietary. The last version of GPL source codes became the base for the great open source vulnerability scanner – OpenVAS (btw, see my post “openvas_commander for OpenVAS installation and management”).

Nessus Vulnerability Scan Results

I am glad that Tenable still keeps Nessus mostly in UNIX-way. Nessus is a vulnerability scanner and makes one thing good – finds vulnerabilities on network hosts. If you need dashboards, advanced user management, advanced reporting capabilities, etc. use Tenable Security Center that works above the Tenable separate products: Nessus, Passive Vulnerability Scanner (PVS) and Log Correlation Engine (LCE).

nessus download page

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Vulners.com search API

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Vulners.com search API. Upd. Vulners released updated Vulners API. What is written below is still working. But now it’s all this can be done much easier.

The greatest thing is “references=true”. It makes possible to get all the referenced objects (exploits, detection plugins, etc.) and bulletin description in ONE search request.

So, for example bellow this query will be enough: https://vulners.com/api/v3/search/lucene/?query=cvss.score:10%20type:centos%20order:published&references=true

Life is getting better! 😉

In a previous post I made a brief review of Vulners.com security content database and search engine. Today let’s see how to automate searching of vulnerabilities, exploits, patches, bugbounty results, etc, with vulners.com search API.

Vulners Search API

It is really easy. We just need to send POST-request to https://vulners.com/api/v1/luceneSearch/ with JSON structure containing search query, size of results you want to get (10000 is maximum), and number of search result entities you would like to skip (optional). Huge size parameter limit makes possible, for example, getting all 2267 CentOS security bulletins with only one request. At the moment, no authorization is required to make requests and no limits for API use exist. Of course, the service is in active development phase and this functionality may be changed soon.

So, let’s get latest CentOS bulletin with most critical vulnerability:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"query":"cvss.score:10 type:centos order:published", "size":1}' https://vulners.com/api/v1/luceneSearch/ | python -m json.tool
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Improved interface of new Nessus Cloud v. 6.6

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Improved interface of new Nessus Cloud v. 6.6. Tenable just released new version of Nessus. Most changes was made in cloud-based version of their popular scanner – Nessus Cloud. Official screenshots are not available yet, so I made couple of them from the tutorial video. If you’re a current Tenable customer, you can log in to the Tenable Support Portal, click the Training Videos link and watch “Workflow changes in Nessus Cloud 6.6” by yourself.

The most interesting change, in my opinion – the new dashboards. Where you’d normally seen a list of scan jobs, you’ll see a new dashboard, that will give you a quick overview of scan results:

  • Changes in number of critical, high, medium and low vulnerabilities detected in the system
  • Part of the vulnerabilities that are exploitable, older than 30 days, detected with authenticated scan and has a remediation recommendations
  • Top vulnerability detection plugins

Nessus Cloud Dashboards

Scan results moved to the separate “Scans” tab. And on the same tab we see the “Resources”: Policies, Asset Lists, Exclusions, Scanners and Agents.

Nessus Cloud Scans

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