How to confirm Nessus vulnerabilities using Nmap and other tools
Most of the vulnerabilities reported by Nessus are signature and value-based, which Nessus makes a decision on based on the code present in the plugins. It is required to confirm these vulnerabilities using manual techniques such as Nmap scripts or port-specific open source tools. This will allow the administration team to put their efforts into the mitigation of the actual vulnerabilities instead of false positives. Also, sometimes, Nessus reports vulnerabilities for which workarounds have already been applied as Nessus only checks with respect to the conditions mentioned in the plugin and cannot recognize any other deviations. In this recipe, we will look at sets to verify multiple vulnerabilities reported by Nessus using Nmap and other open source tools.
In order to create this recipe, we will perform a demo basic network scan on Metasploitable 2's vulnerable virtual machine (look at theĀ Getting ready section in order to...