Nessus

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Nessus is a proprietary vulnerability scanner available free of charge for personal use. There are over 40,000 plugins covering a large range of both local and remote flaws.

Installation

Install the nessus^AUR package.

Post-installation setup

Register your email at the tenable site and wait for your key to be emailed to you.

Usage

The nessus^AUR package provides a nessusd.service unit file, see systemd#Using units for details.

Access the web interface at https://localhost:8834 and/or use the commandline interface (/opt/nessus/sbin/nessuscli). In most browsers, you will need to manually accept the SSL certificate you created for the server.

License

Stop nessusd.service before doing anything with nessuscli.

Activate the license:

# nessuscli fetch --register <Activation Code>

View your current license activation code:

# nessuscli fetch --code-in-use

Plugins update

Stop the nessus daemon before doing anything with /nessuscli.

# systemctl stop nessusd.service

Update the plugins:

# nessuscli update --plugins-only

Removal

The package can be removed with pacman, but files created by Nessus, such as the plugin database it downloads, must be removed manually:

Note: This will delete your Nessus configuration files.

# rm -r /opt/nessus