Specifications

Introduction

This document describes the installation and configuration of Tenable Network Security’s Nessus 6.1 vulnerability

scanner. Please email any comments and suggestions to support@tenable.com.

Tenable Network Security, Inc. is the author and maintainer of the Nessus vulnerability scanner. In addition to constantly

improving the Nessus engine, Tenable writes most of the plugins available to the scanner, as well as compliance checks

and a wide variety of audit policies.

Prerequisites, deployment options, and a walk-through of an installation are described in this document. A basic

understanding of Unix and vulnerability scanning is assumed.

Standards and Conventions

Throughout the documentation, filenames, daemons, and executables are indicated with a courier bold font such as

setup.exe.

Command line options and keywords are also indicated with the courier bold font. Command line examples may or

may not include the command line prompt and output text from the results of the command. Command line examples will

display the command being run in courier bold to indicate what the user typed while the sample output generated by

the system will be indicated in courier (not bold). Following is an example running of the Unix pwd command:

# pwd

/opt/nessus/

Important notes and considerations are highlighted with this symbol and grey text boxes.

Tips, examples, and best practices are highlighted with this symbol and white on blue text.

Organization

Since the Nessus GUI is standard regardless of operating system, this document is laid out with operating system specific

information first, followed by functionality that is common to all operating systems.

New in Nessus 6.1

The following list shows official Nessus product names:

 Nessus®

 Nessus Enterprise

 Nessus Enterprise Cloud

 Nessus Home

Key Feature Updates

The following are some of the features available in Nessus 6.1. For a complete list of changes, please refer to the

Release Notes on the Discussions Forum.

 Unified scan view that combines scanning and schedules into a single view.

 Results from scans are aggregated under one scan result