Nessus was one of the old vulnerability scanner that was started by Renaud Deraison in 1998, it used to be a open source project till 2005, the project was taken over by Tenable Network Security (co-founded by Renaud). Nessus is one of the most commonly used commercial vulnerability scanners in the security community for network infrastructure scanning. Although Tenable has multiple security products. In this section, we will explore the installation of Nessus Professional.
The following provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Nessus on Kali Linux:
- Register as a normal user by visiting https://www.tenable.com/try and selecting Try Nessus Professional Free.
- Download the right version of Nessus from https://www.tenable.com/downloads/.
- Once Nessus is downloaded, run the installer, as shown in the following command:
dpkg -i Nessus-8.1.2-debian6_amd64.deb
Testers should be able to see the following screenshot in their Kali Linux:
- Next step is to start the nessus service by running service nessusd start, which should bring Nessus up on our system.
- By default, the Nessus scanner runs on port 8834 over SSL. Attackers should be able to see the following screenshot following a successful installation:
- Add a new user and activate the license; your scanner will download all the relevant plugins, based on your license.
- Finally, you should be able to see Nessus up and running, as shown in the following screenshot, where it is ready to launch a scan against the target systems/network:
