Nessus 3.2
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Nessus is the world's most popular vulnerability scanner used in over 75,000 organizations world-wide. Many of the world's largest organizations are realizing significant cost savings by using Nessus to audit business-critical enterprise devices and applications. The "Nessus" Project was started by Renaud Deraison in 1998 to provide to the internet community a free, powerful, up-to-date and easy to use remote security scanner. Nessus is currently rated among the top products of its type throughout the security industry and is endorsed by professional information security organizations such as the SANS Institute. It is estimated that the Nessus scanner is used by 75,000 organizations world-wide. In 2002, Renaud co-founded Tenable Network Security with Ron Gula, creator of the Dragon Intrusion Detection System and Jack Huffard. Tenable Network Security is the owner, sole developer and licensor for the Nessus source code, the Nessus trademark and the nessus.org domain worldwide. Tenable is privately held and located in Columbia, MD. Tenable delivers commercial enterprise network security products that perform unique distributed and dedicated vulnerability assessments of computer networks. Tenable offers software products which focus on three areas of security information management:
Features We mostly focus on the developement of security checks for recent security holes. Traditional network security scanners tend to focus on the services listening on the network - and only on these. Now that viruses and worms are propagating thanks to flaws in mail clients or web browsers, this conception of security is getting outdated. Nessus is the only security scanner out there which has the ability to detect the remote flaws of the hosts on your network, but their local flaws and missing patches as well - whether they are running Windows, Mac OS X or a Unix-like system. Get the full picture - not just half of it. Elegant architecture Nessus has been built so that it can easily scale down to a single CPU computer with low memory to a quad-CPUs monster with gigabytes of RAM. The more power you give to Nessus, the quicker it will scan your network. Each security test is written as an external plugin, written in NASL. This means that updating Nessus does not involve downloading untrusted binaries from the internet. Each NASL plugin can be read and modified, to better understand the results of a Nessus report. The Nessus Security Scanner includes NASL, (Nessus Attack Scripting Language) a language designed to write security test easily and quickly. NASL plugins run in a contained environment on top of a virtual machine, thus making Nessus an extremely secure scanner. Unique features Nessus does not believe that the target hosts will respect the IANA assigned port numbers. This means that it will recognize a FTP server running on a non-standard port (ie: 31337), or a web server running on port 8080. Nessus is the first scanner on the market to have implemented this feature for all the security checks (and has been copied by many since then). If a host runs the same service twice or more, Nessus will test all of them. Believe it or not, several scanners on the market still consider that a host can only run one server type at once. Nessus has the ability to test SSLized services such as https, smtps, imaps, and more. You can even supply Nessus with a certificate so that it can integrates into a PKI-fied environement. Once again, Nessus was one of the first security scanner on the market to provide this feature. Nessus gives you the choice between performing a regular non-destructive security audit on a routinely basis, or to throw everything you can at a remote host to see how will it withstands attacks from intruders. Many scanners consider their users to be too inexperienced to make that kind of choice, and only offer them to perform "safe" checks. The most pessimistic computations, based on the number of downloads every day, give Nessus at least 50,000 users worldwide, but there might be even more - after all, Nessus is downloaded over 2,000 times every day ! Our huge user base allows us to get the best feedback regarding security checks - and therefore to offer security checks which are reliable, non destructive and not prone to false positives. The first public release of Nessus was in 1998. The technology behind it has been extensively tested and proven over time, on huge networks. License: FreePublisher: Tenable Network SecurityRequirements: All |
Nessus 3.2 released
Tenable Network Security is proud to announce the availability of Nessus® 3.2.0.
This new major releases contains several improvements, including:
- IPv6 support
- Improved control of network bandwidth usage during scanning
- Granular access to control rules to limit users to specific ports and audits
- Improved WMI support
- Full support for the new .nessus file format
Other notable improvements cover every area, ranging from reduced memory usage, new tools, improved port scanner, new NASL functions, and more.
This new release is available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD.
Nessus 3.1.9 (beta) released
Tenable is proud to announce the immediate availability of Nessus 3.1.9 beta.
The main changes compared to 3.1.5 are the following :
- Debian 4 and Fedora 8 builds
- Fixed several issues with counting the maximum number of TCP
sessions in parallel
- New nessusd.conf options (nasl_log_type, stop_scan_on_hang)
- During a scan, the number of TCP sessions in parallel shows up if log_whole_attack is set
- The 'nessus' command-line tool can now import .nessus files
- 'nessuscmd' can upload ssh keys and .audit files on the remote server
- Improved nessus_tcp_scanner
- Several bug fixes
NessusClient 3.0.1 released
Tenable is proud to announce the availability of NessusClient 3.0.1.
NessusClient 3 is the official GUI for the standalone version of Nessus. Its key features are :
- Real-time results. No need to wait until the end of a scan to start analyzing the findings of Nessus
- Document based. Save your policies, scan results and scan targets into a single file
- New XML based report format. The new '.nessus' file format saves into a single XML file your scan policies, scan targets and scan results
- Multiple connections. NessusClient can connect to several scanners at the same time
- Consistent interface. The same interface exists on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux
This product can be downloaded from Nessus.org for Windows, Ubuntu Linux, Debian Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Fedora Core 6 and 7, and OpenSUSE 10.2
This update contains the following fixes :
- Exporting a policy to the old .nessusrc format now generates a file which properly configures the port scanners and plugin preferences
- On Windows, importing scan policies from NessusGUI.exe properly enables the plugins
NessusClient 3.0.0.beta3 released
Tenable Network Security, Inc. is proud to announce the availability of NessusClient 3.0.0 beta3.
NessusClient 3 is a completely redesigned GUI for the Nessus server, which offers the same experience for Windows and Linux Mac OS X users have been experiencing for several months.
This new beta fixes several buglets and now offers the ability to convert older scans results from NessusGUI.exe (on Windows) and NessusClient 1.0.x (Linux) to the new .nessus file format.
Nessus 3.0.6.1 for Windows released
A new version of Nessus 3.0.6.1 for Windows has been released.
This version fixes a security problem which exists on every version of Nessus 3.0.x for Windows with regards to the NessusGUI.exe interface which registers an ActiveX which contains a security vulnerability.
Every Windows user is highly encouraged to upgrade to this version.
More info
NessusClient 3.0.0.beta1 released
Tenable Network Security, Inc. is proud to announce the availability of NessusClient 3.0.0 beta1.
More Information
NessusClient 3 is a completely redesigned GUI for the Nessus server, which offers the same experience for Windows and Linux Mac OS X users have been experiencing for several months.
Its key features are the following :
- Real-time results. No need to wait until the end of a scan to start analyzing the findings of Nessus
- Document based. Save your policies, scan results and scan targets into a single file
- New file format. The new '.nessus' file format (which is XML based) saves into a single file your scan policies, scan targets and scan results
- Multiple connections. NessusClient can connect to several scanners at the same time
- Consistant interface. The same interface exists on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux
This beta can be downloaded from Nessus.org for Windows, Ubuntu Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Fedora Core 6 and 7, and OpenSUSE 10.2
A blog entry details this release furthermore.
Nessus 3.0.6 released
Tenable Network Security, Inc. is proud to announce the availability of Nessus 3.0.6 for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD.
This release contains the following fixes and enhancements :
- Fixed a cross site scripting vulnerability in the Windows GUI
- Fixed a possible segfault condition occuring when multiple clients simultaneously log into the nessusd server
- Fixed a memory leak in nasl scripts containing a function on_exit()
- Improved performance when logging into nessusd
- The scan does not fail any more if the main nessusd process runs out of file descriptors (this would occur on Solaris with max_host set to a value higher than 200)
More Information
- Several fixes in the NASL interpreter
- Builds for Fedora Core 7 and Red Hat ES 5
Tenable would like to thank to Japanese CERT for having notified us about the Windows cross site scripting issue.
Tenable earns CIS Certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Tenable Network Security, Inc. today announced that it has been awarded a CIS certifications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux audits.
These checks can be performed by customers using the Nessus Policy Compliance checks plugins which come as part of the Nessus Direct feed.
A blog entry details how to use these while doing your audits.
Nessus 3.1.4 (beta) released
Today, Tenable released Nessus 3.1.4 beta. Here are the main changes compared to Nessus 3.1.3 :
- 64 bits builds (for Debian 4 and Red Hat ES 5 only at this time)
- Fedora Core 7 build
- Better support for IPv6. In particular, the functions get_local_mac_addr() / get_gw_mac_addr() work when dealing with an IPv6 host
- Fixed a bug related to the maximum number of TCP sessions set in parallel and which would cause nessusd to use more CPU than what is necessary
- Added several fixes in the NASL interpreter. In some cases, a copy-on-write operation would not be detected properly thus leading to incorrect modifications of some variables ;
- Fixed nessuscmd which would not be able to use the local nessus daemon any more
- The 'nessus' command-line utility can now produce the same report type (.nessus) as the Mac OS X client
- Several other smaller bug fixes as well as further optimisations to reduce memory usage.
The whole Nessus 3.1.x series is considered as being in beta. When it reaches production quality, it will be labelled Nessus 3.2.x. The main list of changes between Nessus 3.2 and Nessus 3.0 is available on Tenable's blog
Nessus 3.1.3 (beta) released
Here are the main changes compared to Nessus 3.1.2 :
More Information
- Reduced overall memory usage
- Improved Solaris support
- Stability fixes
- Improved IPv6 support
- RHEL 5 support
The whole Nessus 3.1.x series is considered as being in beta. When it reaches production quality, it will be labelled Nessus 3.2.x. The main list of changes between Nessus 3.2 and Nessus 3.0 is available on Tenable's blog.