Since Nessus is the most widely used one, let's try it out. When they no longer produce false positives, penetration testers will be unemployed, but I don't expect to see that in my lifetime.Īs a white hat hacker/pentester, you need to be familiar with vulnerability scanners. That's why companies and institutions still need white hat hackers-to separate out the false positives from the true positives. These scans may produce hundreds of potential vulnerabilities and usually less than 10% are actual vulnerabilities. Probably the greatest limiting factor in using vulnerability scanners are the false positives. They cannot detect zero-days, and like AV software, their database needs to be updated daily to be accurate. military base around the world now uses Nessus to scan for vulnerabilities. government has only recently switched over to Nessus for all their vulnerability scanning. Fortunately, not all organizations have a vigilant security/network admin.Īlthough Nessus has been around for quite awhile, the U.S. Unfortunately, vulnerability scanners are very 'noisy' and a vigilant security/network admin will detect it. Then, you simply need to find the proper exploit to take advantage of it. That's what we will be using here.Īs a hacker, if you can do a vulnerability scan on an internal network, you will have a database of all the potential vulnerabilities on the network.

Despite this, Nessus still has a 'home' vulnerability scanner that they give away for free, and you can use it for up to 16 IP addresses. Originally begun as an open-source project, it was purchased by Tenable and is now a commercial product. It has become a kind of standard for vulnerability scanners. If vulnerability scanners could accurately detect vulnerabilities, then who would need pentesters?Īmong the most widely used vulnerability scanners on the market is Nessus. These are found vulnerabilities by the scanner that are not really there. Vulnerability scanners are notorious for throwing false positives. If they do, it is your job to test whether they are real and can be exploited. Vulnerability scanners contain a database of all known vulnerabilities and will scan your machine or network to see whether those vulnerabilities appear to exist.

Generally, you will want to perform a vulnerability scan before doing a penetration test.

How to use nessus key