Gladiator Security Forum > Introduction to 'Nessus'

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TheSentinel

Dec 21 2003, 10:09 PM

Hi there :)

the following 2 articles are refering to a security test tool which is used with UNIX/Linux to check for possible network vulnerbilities. It's a mighty program and offers lot of details of a network and its structure. This articles will here be continued when released and if you wanna read them.

Greetz
B. Udo

QUOTE

Introduction to Nessus
by Harry Anderson
last updated October 28, 2003

1.0 Introduction
Nessus is a great tool designed to automate the testing and discovery of known security problems. Typically someone, a hacker group, a security company, or a researcher discovers a specific way to violate the security of a software product. The discovery may be accidental or through directed research; the vulnerability, in various levels of detail, is then released to the security community. Nessus is designed to help identify and solve these known problems, before a hacker takes advantage of them. Nessus is a great tool with lots of capabilities. However it is fairly complex and few articles exist to direct the new user through the intricacies of how to install and use it. Thus, this article shall endeavor to cover the basics of Nessus setup and configuration. The features of the current versions of Nessus (Nessus 2.0.8a and NessusWX 1.4.4) will be discussed. Future articles will cover Nessus in more depth.

More to read:
http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1741

TheSentinel

Dec 21 2003, 10:10 PM

Here article 2

QUOTE

Nessus, Part 2: Scanning
by Harry Anderson
last updated December 16, 2003

1.0 Introduction

Nessus is a vulnerability scanner, a program that looks for security bugs in software. There is a freely available open source version which runs on Unix. Tenable Security has also recently released a commercial version for Windows called Newt. Boasting over 1200 checks for individual security vulnerabilities, Nessus is a wonderful tool to help track down and eliminate security problems.

This article, the second in the series, will attempt to provide direction through the actual scanning process, general logic and rules of thumbs for parameter choices in different situations. If unfamiliar with Nessus, a reading of the first article will provide needed background information.

More to read:
http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1753

TheSentinel

Mar 29 2004, 11:12 AM

Heya

I've posted the first 2 articles of that series last year. Here the 3rd article

Greetz
B. Udo

QUOTE

Nessus, Part 3: Analysing Reports
by Harry Anderson
last updated February 3, 2004

1.0 Introduction

This article, the last in the series about Nessus, will endeavor to explain a Nessus report and how to analyze it. Nessus is a vulnerability scanner, a program that looks for security bugs in software. The first article explained how to install Nessus and a basic overview of features. The second article gave general rules of thumb for various scanning situations. It is suggested that you review the first two articles before reading this one.

More to read:
http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1759

Chachazz

Jan 30 2006, 04:52 AM

Nessus 3.0.1 has been released
8th January, 2006:

Nessus 3.0.1 (build 114) is now available on our web sites.
Here is the list of changes in this release :

- Improvements :
- Lighter resources consumption of the master processes, which in turn improve scalability (one has to account for ~ 6 megabytes of RAM per host tested in parallel)
- Reduce the CPU usage of nessusd when the only running plugin is executing a local command
- Improved the timing of synscan.nes which could result in very long (nearly infinite in time) port scans
- Slightly faster (~ 20%) initial processing of the plugins

- Bug fixes :
- When nessusd updates itself, the process now restarts properly
- Fixed the error message "Warning this scanner seems to be using the plugin feed of another host" which would
sometimes be displayed when the nessusd host changes of IP addresses
- Fixed a NULL pointer dereferencement which may happen in some cases when dealing with shared sockets

- Other:
- Removed bogus warning messages occuring when max_checks is set to a very high value (which is not a good idea in the first place -- max_checks should be set to 4 most of the time)
- KB files of hosts which are dead are not saved on disk (as they are empty)
- Re-introduced HTML export, due to popular demand
- The RPMs have stronger dependencies set
- The SuSE 9.3 build is now linked to the default libdb 4.3

http://www.nessus.org/

Terryala

May 12 2006, 09:14 PM

Nessus 3.0.2 released::::7th March, 2006:

Here is the list of changes since 3.0.1 :

nessusd :

Fixed a problem causing the scan to hang if max_checks was set to a value which is way too high

Plugged a small memory leak occuring when re-using the same connection to perform an additional scan

Plugged a small memory leak in the plugins scheduler

Fixed bug#1426 (crash on startup when processing a malformed nessusd.conf file)

Improved the 'default' list of ports to scans with a new file 'nessus-services'

nessus :

'nessus -V' (verbose) works again

nasl :

A new function, inject_packet(), can write directly to layer 2

The function 'end_denial()' would not work when used in command-line mode

Fixed a potential bus error occuring on memory exhaustion

Fixed an integer overflow causing a segfault when processing some kind of malformed script

libnessus :

Fixed a bug in the SSL transport layer which may cause find_services.nes to hang longer than expected on SSL_read()

Fixed the function in charge of getting the list of network interfaces which would get a wrong netmask when dealing with an interface alias

plugins :

Fixed several bugs in find_services.c which would not properly set the key Transport/SSL or which may read some data beyond its buffer

Fixed a bad #if/#endif clause in nessus_tcp_scanner.c which prevented it from recomputing the RTT, hence negatively impacting the performance

nmap.nasl has been removed from the main distribution (to use nmap from within Nessus, read this page)

http://www.nessus.org/download/

Grand Dad

Alter

Nov 15 2006, 10:34 AM

Hi

can anyone help me understand Nessus 2.2.9? I've a problem generating attack events on Nessus 2.2.9 Server on Linux ES 3.

Events of the form ::
user nessuser : launching smb_scope.nasl against TARGET_HOST [<ProcessId>]

Can these events be generated in Nessus 3.0.4 by the same process?

Thanks in Advance

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