Vulnerability Assessment with Nessus Free Version- Hands-on Practices

Vulnerability management is the practice of staying aware of known vulnerabilities in an environment and then resolving or mitigating these vulnerabilities to improve the environment’s overall security posture. To manage your vulnerabilities you must first start to discover and assess them. In today’s cyber security environment we have a powerful tool that can discover and assess vulnerabilities: Tenable Nessus. While it has a paid pro version, it also has a free-essentials version which has many features.

Building Our Lab

Our lab environment will be deployed to the VMware environment. You can download and use one month for free the latest VMware workstation version.

Download VMware Workstation Pro

we will deploy Nessus Essentials to the win7 machine. You can use windows 10 too if you have enough ram source on your PC or laptop.

The famous Metasploitable-2 will be our server and Linux machine.

Our client machine will be windows XP, but you can use win7 or win 10 if you have enough ram source.

Using XP, Metesploitable, and Win7, you can create your lab even ifyou have a 4 GB ram source.

Our Nessus Machine, server, and client are on the same VLAN. In a real-life scenario, they will most probably be in different VLANs. If there is a FireWall between them you must permit the Nessus machine with “any” rule if you want to have a proper output.

You can watch this free course for building a home lab with VMware.

https://www.udemy.com/course/vmware-vsphere-home-lab/learn/lecture/9511404?start=0#overview

Deploying Nessus Home

You can download Nessus Essentials from here.

Nessus Product Family

Your VMs must be on the same VMnet.

After filling out the application form you will receive an activation mail with an activation code.

Downloading process will be a little long. Don’t worry.

By clicking the new scan button you can start your first scan.

First, let’s discover assets on our network. In our lab scenario, you can discover our VMnet machines: metasploitable and XP. But If you choose “bridge mode” at the VMware settings menu of the win7 Nessus machine, you can discover all assets on your home network even your mobile phone and tablets our your naughty neighbors who use your wifi network :)

Choose Basic networkscan

choose configure to edit scan settings.

Editing target setting: to scan your network chance your IPv4 address’s last digits to 0/24

After editing configuration menu settings you can click the launch button.

by clicking ipconfig you can learn your computer’s IP address. here it is IPv4:192.168.42.131

Advanced Scan for Your Newly Discovered Assets

We have discovered assets on our network. Now we can go further and scan them deeply. Choose advanced scan from the scan menu. Now enter your XP, Linux assets IP address to the target menu.

you must put coma “,” between your IP addresses.

If you want to gain deeper results for your target machine you must enter credentials for your target assets.

for your xp click windows than enter your XP’s username and password

For your Linux machine click SSH then enter your Linux asset’s username and password. Don’t forget to choose a password after clicking the SSH button, you have a public key and other SSH options but here we only have a password and username.

Click the Plugins button. You can disable plugins if you don’t want to use them during the scan. Here I only disable DoS Plugins. Yes! Nessus has the ability to DoS test.

By clicking “report” button we can genarete our scan report.

Java run time environment doesn’t install to my Win7 Nessus. If you install java run time you can see the “PDF” report format.

Check Apache Log4j Remote Code Execution Vulnerability with Nessus.

Creating Scan Policy: Apache Log4j Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Scan Policy

Scan policies allow you to create policies to use every time for your targets. For example you can create a scan policy that can scan only scan “Apache Log4j Remote Code Execution Vulnerability”

click new policy

first disable all plugins.

Then enable the plugins which you want to scan.

Click User defined.

select the policy that you have created before.

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