Vulnerability scanning with Nessus

So far, we have learned the basics of port scanning, along with the practical implementation with Nmap. Port scanning has been extended to several other tools which further enhance the process of scanning and information gathering. In the next few recipes, we will cover those tools which scan the target for available services and open ports and then tries to determine the type of vulnerability that may exist for that particular service or port. Let us begin our journey to vulnerability scanning.

Nessus is one of the most widely used vulnerability scanners. It scans the target for a range of vulnerabilities and produces a detailed report for it. Nessus is a very helpful tool during penetration testing. Either you can use the GUI version of Nessus, or you can also use it from the Metasploit console. In this book, we will primarily focus on using Nessus with msfconsole.

Getting ready

To start working with Nessus in msfconsole, we will have to load Nessus and...