Nessus is one of the most popular and reputable vulnerability scanners in the industry and is used by many professionals within the field of cybersecurity. It has become the de facto industry standard for performing vulnerability assessments among cybersecurity professionals. Some of the benefits of using Nessus include the following:

• Discovery of over 45,000 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs)
• Contains over 100,000 plugins (used to discover vulnerabilities)
• Frequent updates of new plugins for newly disclosed vulnerabilities
• Able to identify over 100 zero-day vulnerabilities for the past three years

Let's log in to Nessus on our Kali Linux machine; firstly, you'll need to enable the Nessus service using the following command within a Terminal window:

service nessusd start

Once the service has been successfully enabled, open the web browser in Kali Linux, enter https://localhost:8834 within the address bar, and hit Enter. You should see the following login portal:

Log in using your user account, which was created during the setup process. Once you are logged in, the main dashboard is available. Here you'll be able to configure and access policies and plugin rules, create new scans, and view results. The Nessus user interface is a very simple-to-use interface, and in a very short time you'll be very familiar with it.