Installing nessus client

Now we should have working Docker installation on our Kali box and we can proceed with installing Nessus into it. As a base system for our Nessus container, we will use Centos 7 Linux distribution. We will use Centos 7 because it has all the dependencies that we need. Namely we want to install Hydra tool and integrate Nessus with it. This will give Nessus login brute forcing capabilities during vulnerability scans.

Nessus will be able to perform login attacks against various network services using supplied wordlists. Note that in Centos 8 the Hydra package is not available. Therefore we have to stick with Centos 7. However, this may change in the future and in that case the steps below should work with very minor tweaks for Centos 8 as well.

First we need to download the latest Nessus package from the official Downloads page link. At the time of writing of this article the latest version was 8. Scroll down and download the installation file Nessus Next we have to create a Dockerfile. A Dockerfile contains set of instructions for building a Docker image.

Once we have everything prepared, we can build the Nessus Docker image using the following command:. The building process will typically take a few minutes. After the building process is done, we should see something similar to this:. We are almost done. We have successfully built our Nessus Docker image and now we can start a new Docker container using that image. Note that we will assign a custom MAC address to the container. This will allow us later on to backup the container and move it to another system, if needed.

This is very useful when we want to use Nessus without internet access, for instance. After the activation and consequent compilation of plugins, we can login to it and start using it. Nessus can also contact Hydra an external tool to attack the dictionary. In this section, we are going to discuss how to Install Nessus on Windows. To do this, just follow the steps below. First, you have to open one of your favorite browsers and go to the Nessus website to download Nessus :.

Click I Agree in the window that opens to confirm the license agreement. Doing so will start downloading the installation file. Now you need to go to the place where you downloaded the file and double-click on it to start the installation process.

To start the installation in the window that opens, click on Run :. In the next step, check the I accept the terms… option and click on Next :. Here you can click on Chang… to determine the installation location of Nessus.

After doing this, click on Next :. Note: If you have not already installed WinPcap on your system, you should follow the steps below to install WinPcap. In this section, we want to teach you how to install WinPcap on Windows to use Nessus. To download WinPcap , first, open one of the browsers you want and go to the WinPcap website.

Click on the Download as shown below:. Now go to the place where you downloaded the installation file and double-click on it in the window that opens and click on Run :.

After you have successfully installed Nessus in the previous sections, we are now going to teach you how to configure it. Before actually running the scan we must define a filename, which specified the targets we would like to scan. To scan the target Google we can save the appropriate hostname into the filename results. We used a bunch of options with the nessus command line tool. The -q option tells Nessus to operate in batch mode.

At the end is our existing filename targets. When the scan is finished, it will be added to the Reports tab where we can view the results of the scan.

We can also export the report in various formats to be viewed by other people. Here we can create a new scan by defining the hostname of the target website and the policy the scan will use. When the scan is started, it will be added to a list of all scans already done or currently pending still in the Scans tab. There are various actions we can take with each of the scans: stop it, pause it, delete it, etc. Nessus policies Nessus policies specify what Nessus will do when the scan is being run.

The Basic field in General tab allows us to name the scan policy, define its visibility and describe the policy. In Network Congestion we can specify options that reduce the network load being sent to the testing web server if congestion is detected.

The Port Scanners specify the scan methods used to detect if the port is opened or not. Next, there are Port Scan Options where we can specify the ports the Nessus will scan. We can input the ports manually as a comma-separated list of values. Alternatively we can choose between two already defined options: default and all. The default option scans around standard ports, whereas all scan all available ports. We can use credentials to login into several services automatically by Nessus, which should determine if security patches are applied and if the latest version of software is being used.

In the drop-down menu we have the option to choose one of the following options: Windows credentials, SSH settings, Kerberos configuration or Cleartext protocol settings. Allows us to choose a specific security checks to be performed against the target website.

On the picture below we can see the enabled category FTP that will try to detect an anomaly in the FTP server; it will do that by checking the existing FTP server against all the defined plugins on the right that represent all currently known vulnerabilities in FTP servers:. The Preferences tab allows us to further set our scanning options. We can input as much information as we know about the target system.

This enables the Nessus scanner to perform the scans more accurately and quickly.