Nessus

Nessus is a popular vulnerability assessment tool that we have already seen in Chapter 1, Introduction to Metasploit and Supporting Tools. Now, there are two alternatives of using Nessus with Metasploit, as follows:

• Perform a Nessus scan on the target system, save the report, and then import it into the Metasploit Framework using the db_import command as discussed earlier in this chapter
• Load, initiate, and trigger a Nessus scan on the target system directly through msfconsole as described in the next section

Scanning using Nessus from msfconsole

Before we start a new scan using Nessus, it is important to load the Nessus plugin in msfconsole. Once the plugin is loaded, you can connect to your Nessus instance using a pair of credentials, as shown in the next screenshot.

Note

Before loading nessus in msfconsole, make sure that you start the Nessus daemon using the /etc/init.d/nessusd start command.

Once the nessus plugin is loaded, and we are connected to the nessus service, we need to select...