Book Image

Learning Nessus for Penetration Testing

By : Himanshu Kumar
Book Image

Learning Nessus for Penetration Testing

By: Himanshu Kumar

Overview of this book

<p>IT security is a vast and exciting domain, with vulnerability assessment and penetration testing being the most important and commonly performed security activities across organizations today. The Nessus tool gives the end user the ability to perform these kinds of security tests quickly and effectively.</p> <p>Nessus is a widely used tool for vulnerability assessment, and Learning Nessus for Penetration Testing gives you a comprehensive insight into the use of this tool. This book is a step-by-step guide that will teach you about the various options available in the Nessus vulnerability scanner tool so you can conduct a vulnerability assessment that helps to identify exposures in IT infrastructure quickly and efficiently. This book will also give you an insight into penetration testing and how to conduct compliance checks using Nessus.</p> <p>This book starts off with an introduction to vulnerability assessment and penetration testing before moving on to show you the steps needed to install Nessus on Windows and Linux platforms.</p> <p>Throughout the course of this book, you will learn about the various administrative options available in Nessus such as how to create a new user. You will also learn about important concepts like how to analyze results to remove false positives and criticality. At the end of this book, you will also be introduced to the compliance check feature of Nessus and given an insight into how it is different from regular vulnerability scanning.</p> <p>Learning Nessus for Penetration Testing teaches you everything you need to know about how to perform VA/PT effectively using Nessus to secure your IT infrastructure and to meet compliance requirements in an effective and efficient manner.</p>
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Report automation


The report automation section is not specific to Nessus; in general, the multiple Vulnerability Assessment tools available in the market and their older versions don't support the generation of reports in the Microsoft Excel or PDF formats. In order to make the most out of those autogenerated reports and to conform them with organizations' preferred reporting formats, mostly Excel or Word, scripts can be written to convert those default reports to generate reports for our own needs.

One other need for Nessus reports' automation is that while you integrate Nessus reports using different tools, such as Archer and Agiliance, which are governance risk and compliance tools; the security information and event management tool; or any other tools available in your organization using which you want Nessus to generate Vulnerability Assessment results. In these cases, for integration, every tool has certain prerequisite formats for reports. Most tools accept CSV formats. In order to...