Most attackers utilize open source tools to launch attacks; however, commercial vulnerability scanners come with their own advantages and disadvantages in speeding up the penetration testing process. In this section, we will learn Nessus and Nexpose installation in Kali Linux, and since these scanners are backed up by respectable companies, they do have comprehensive documentation, so we will not be taking a deep dive into configuring these tools.
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.