Install Nessus on Ubuntu

Last Updated on Saturday, 3 May o 08:24 Written by admin Thursday, 1 May o 10:27

The Nessus® vulnerability scanner, is the world-leader in active scanners, featuring high speed discovery, configuration auditing, asset profiling, sensitive data discovery and vulnerability analysis of your security posture. Nessus scanners can be distributed throughout an entire enterprise, inside DMZs, and across physically separate nehe Nessus daemon.

We need to install Nessus client and the Nessus daemon:

sudo apt-get install nessus nessusd

Once this is done you will have to start the Nessus daemon manually.

sudo /etc/init.d/nessusd start

Now you will need to add a Nessus user.

sudo nessus-adduser

1.) Type in a username. This does not have to be the same as your main username, because this is specific to Nessus
2.) When prompted for authentication type, just press Enter
3.) Enter your password twice as requested
4.) When asked for user rules, just press Ctrl+D

This will have created a new user with access to the Nessus daemon.
Now you will need to go to Nessus’s website and register with them to get the latest plugins.
Once there, you can either pay for the updates or select the free version of it.
The free version just means that you need to wait 7 days before the updates are available to you.
Once you get the email sent to you there is a unique activation code for the Nessus plugin which is needed for the next step.

sudo nessus-fetch –register ACTIVATION-CODE-NUMBER

This will download all the latest plugins and install them locally.

You can now run the Nessus Client and the GUI should appear.
Once the client has started you will need to change the user to the one you created earlier in the “USER” field and supply the password.
Please note that the Login won’t work if the Nessus daemon is not running.
Accept the Certificate and you are ready to start using Nessus.

Nessus does not update the plugins automatically so you will have to do this manually or create a Cron Job to do this for you.
To automate the update process, please visit CRONJOB.

If you want to update the Plugins manually, follow this command:

sudo nessus-update-plugins