Tag Archives: Tenable

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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Vulnerability Management in APAC

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Vulnerability Management in APAC. Tenable Network Security published Forrester report on Vulnerability Management in APAC (China: 25%, Singapore: 25%, Japan: 25%, ANZ: 25%). Everything is pretty bad. The majority of the respondents scan their systems periodically (annually). Key challenges: the difficulty of remediation and prioritization. It seems that 30% respondents don’t even have automatically updatable Security Content in their VM solution.
Forrester Vulnerability Management in APAC

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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Remediation capabilities of Vulnerability Management products

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Remediation capabilities of Vulnerability Management products. Vulnerability scanning and vulnerability management. This terms are often used synonymously. However, most top security vendors and institutions, express an opinion, that vulnerability management is a more complex process that includes vulnerability scanning (vulnerability assessment in general), remediation and some other stages, like asset management and risk assessment.

Vulnerability Management Lifecycle

Remediation in most cases, does not mean that the vulnerability management product automatically tries to patch vulnerable system, but rather provide functionality to control remediation process. In other words, it contains a built-in task tracker, where security administrators could assign tickets (manually or automatically) on system administrators to patch or reconfigure vulnerable systems. For example, such functionality is implemented in Tenable Security Center and Qualys Cloud Suite.

NB: In most cases, but there are exceptions, as ERPScan, Secpod Saner or ConfigOS. This solutions can actually update vulnerable systems automatically.

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