A Practical Guide to Installing Nessus

 

Tenable, a highly respected name in the security community, has produced an amazing application for vulnerability scanning called N essus. There are two versions of the application that offer differing levels of functionality and support these are the Nessus Professional and Home versions. The professional version offers a lot more plug-ins for compliancy checking, S CA D A , and configuration checking and is incredibly powerful for team usage. For this book, the installation of the N essus Vulnerability S canner with the
home feed will be used. N essus is discussed further in the chapter on scanning but installing Nessus now will help to cement the knowledge from this chapter. 

Update and Clean the System Prior to Installing Nessus

In a terminal windows type the following commands:
 

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade
 

apt-get autoremove && apt-get autoclean
 

Install and Configure Nessus

Download N essus 5.0 or higher from http://www.nessus.org/download. S elect the Debian package for either 32- or 64-bit operating system as appropriate. Read the subscription agreement and if acceptable agree to the statement by clicking the A gree bu on. Nessus cannot be installed if the agreement is not accepted. N ote the location where the file is being downloaded to as it will be needed to complete the installation.
 

From a terminal window enter the following:
 

dpkg -i ~/{Download_Location}/Nessus-{version}.deb
 

To run

 

/etc/init.d/nessusd start
 

https://kali:8834/nessus6.html#/