Nessus version 4.0 released

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In: Nessus , Vulnerability Scanner

9 April 2009

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 following is a highlight of some of the features and improvements:

  • Nessus Engine
  • Uses the same engine on Windows and Unix-based systems for a unified experience on all platforms and more consistent results
  • Fully thread-based (as opposed to process based) for better scalability and reduced memory usage
  • Performance improvements to reduce CPU usage on all platforms
  • Port scanners
  • Local and remote port scanners can now be combined. For example, if you select the Nessus SYN scanner and the netstat WMI portscanner , Nessus will try to log in via WMI to enumerate the ports first, then to fall back to the SYN scanner
  • The TCP SYN port scanner has been rewritten entirely and operates the same between Windows and Unix-based systems
  • Native UDP port scanner (ProfessionalFeed Only)
  • Compliance Checking
  • The database compliance checks can now log into MSSQL over SSL
  • The PCI-DSS plugins are now fully supported
  • NASL (Nessus Attack Scripting Language)
  • Added support for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) to NASL
  • NASL scripts can now share results between hosts via a global knowledgebase
  • New NASL functions (XML parsing, the bignum library, new packet forgery functions, new socket-related functions and more)
  • NessusClient
  • Support for XLST transformations of the reports - This is one of the most exciting features and will be described in more detail in upcoming blog posts.
  • The ability to export a .nessus file based on a filtered report
  • Unlimited number of filters for the NessusClient on Windows and Unix-based systems
  • Cross-Platform
  • No external libraries are required, eliminating the need to tamper with your system configuration in /etc/ld.so.conf
  • Added support for the newest Linux distributions (Debian 5, Fedora 10, etc.)
  • New "linux-generic32" and "linux-generic64" builds for additional linux distributions
  • 64-bit native builds of Nessus/NessusClient for FreeBSD, Windows and Linux
  • All the Unix command-line tools (e.g., nessus-fetch, ’nessus’, nessuscmd) now also run on Windows

Post scriptum

Compliance Mandates

  • Vulnerability Scanner :

    PCI DSS 11.2, 6.6, SOX A13.3, GLBA 16CFR Part 314.4(c), HIPAA 164.308(a)(8), FISMA RA-5, SI-2, ISO 27001-27002 12.6, 15.2.2


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