Tag Archives: Nexpose

Tenable Nessus: registration, installation, scanning and reporting

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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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An introduction to Rapid7 Nexpose API

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Another nice thing about Nexpose is that this vulnerability scanner has an open API. And even free Nexpose Community Edition supports it.

Rapid7 Nexpose API

It’s a really generous gift from Rapid7. That means that you can use Nexpose to scan your environment, easily manage it from your scripts and make any vulnerability assessment and remediation logic you need.

I haven’t found manuals about using Nexpose API to automate basic vulnerability management tasks and decided to write my own. Hope somebody will find it useful. All examples will be in form of curl requests.

Working with Nexpose API is nothing more than sending xml Post-requests to the https://[Nexpose Host]:3780/api/[API Version]/xml and receiving xml responses.
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Testing Rapid7 Nexpose CE vulnerability scanner

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Today I want to write about another great vulnerability management solution – Nexpose Community Edition by Rapid7. What makes it special? Nexpose CE is a fully functional network vulnerability scanner that can be used for free not only by home users (Nessus Home, for example, has such restrictions), but also by the companies.

Nexpose Community Edition by Rapid7

However, the company should be quite small. By using Nexpose Community Edition you have a permission to scan only 32 ip addresses. But it could be any kind of host: Linux and Windows, Unix and network equipment. And you can scan it as often as you like, with different profiles and produce wide range of reports.

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