Running your first Nessus Scan

If you've just installed Nessus Essentials and are now sat wondering what next, to give you a quick idea, we'll do a first scan to show you how it works. If you've not yet installed Nessus but want to, check out my last post on "Installing Nessus Essentials on Kali Linux". Lets get scanning...

Following on from where we left off or from opening Nessus, if you're not on the screen below, click "My Scans" from the left hand menu and then "New Scan" on the top right of the page to bring you to our stating point:

Click the "Basic Network Scan" button. In the Name field, you can give the scan a name to identify it (useful if you configure a scan that you want to run again in the future), I'll call mine Test, you can give it a description where you can details the reason for the scan or the configuration used but I'm leaving mine blank. The Targets field is where you need to put your IP addresses for the scan, I'm just going to use the loopback address to scan the local machine (you could also create a file of IP addresses and upload that to save typing them all in). I'm not going to go through the rest of the options as they're not required for a quick scan but you can explore them at your own leisure.

Click Save. Now you have a Scan saved to My Scans that you can find, run and rerun as required. 

To kick off the scan, click the little Play icon (or the launch button as it's called) to the right (the X will delete the saved scan!) and you'll see the Update icon, the Play button turns to a Pause button and the last scanned field gets updated. Sit back and wait for the scan to complete.

Once complete, the update icon turns to a tick. Click on the scan to see the results:

The top bar shows 3 tabs. Hosts shows the Hosts scanned and an overview of the scan results. The Vulnerabilities tab, well, shows the vulnerabilities. In my case 42 of them (eek). 

When you click on the tab, you get the full list and you can click on each to get a detailed view of the vulnerability description with CVE links:

You may also get a solution to mitigate the vulnerability (now would be the time to go fix it!):

And that's the basic power of Nessus Essentials. This has been a quick tutorial to get a first scan in the bag. There are many more options, settings and scan types that you can run and I'd encourage you to explore. You can find out more info from the Nessus documentation page at Nessus Documentation | Tenable™ or from their community pages at Home (tenable.com) 

I hope you enjoyed this quick walkthrough of running your first scan, thanks for reading.

Rich.

Credits:

Kali Linux | Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking Linux Distribution

Download Tenable Nessus Vulnerability Assessment | Tenable®