Nessus Vulnerability Scanner

Nessus is a widely-used proprietary vulnerability scanner developed by Tenable Network Security, designed to automatically discover, assess, and remediate security vulnerabilities across IT infrastructure. Created by Renaud Deraison in 1998 as an open-source project, Nessus was commercialized by Tenable in 2005 and has become the industry-standard vulnerability assessment tool, used by over 30,000 organizations worldwide including over 65 percent of the Fortune 500. Key features include: vulnerability detection (over 150,000 plugins detecting known vulnerabilities including CVEs, zero-days, misconfigurations, and malware), plugin architecture (NASL-based plugins updated daily by the Tenable Research team, covering all major operating systems, network devices, databases, web applications, and cloud platforms), compliance auditing (checking configurations against CIS Benchmarks, DISA STIGs, PCI-DSS, NIST, and HIPAA compliance standards), authenticated scanning (deep scanning using SSH, Windows credentials, and database credentials for precise local vulnerability and patch detection), network device scanning (supporting Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Fortinet, and other network infrastructure via SNMP, SSH, and vendor APIs), web application scanning (dynamic application security testing including OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities), malware detection (detecting known malware infections and botnet connections), patch audit (identifying missing patches and hotfixes for Windows, Linux, and macOS), scan templates (predefined templates including Basic Network Scan, Advanced Scan, Web Application Tests, and Credentialed Patch Audit), and Nessus Manager (centralized management for distributed scanners with team collaboration and reporting).