Re: [Full-Disclosure] Nessus experience

From: Samir Kelekar (samir_at_teknotrends.com)
Date: 10/14/04

  • Next message: winter: "RE: [Full-Disclosure] Possibly a stupid question RPC over HTTP" 
    To: "Mr. Rufus Faloofus" <foofus@foofus.net>, <full-disclosure@lists.netsys.com>
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 13:35:11 +0530

    Nessus takes too much time as what happens is that all the plugins get
    passed from
    nessusd to the nessus client, and then back to the nessusd. This happens
    even if you
    want to run a few (and not all) plugins. Nessus does not have a way to
    choose only
    a few plugins in the nessusd itself while it is running.
     The only way nessus provides of choosing plugins is
    via the nessus client.

    One way to get around the problem is to only load those plugins that nessusd
    needs,
    and not use the Nessus Client to choose/override the plugins. This would
    require
    that you restart nessusd everytime you want a different set of plugins.
    This speeds nessus
    runs considerably.

    If you are looking for an already built solution that does the above, look
    at our
    web-site http://www.teknotrends.com or mail me off-line.

    Thanks,
    Samir Kelekar
    Teknotrends Software
    Bangalore.

    > Greetings, full-disclosure!
    >
    > From time to time I find myself needing to estimate the time it takes
    > to run Nessus against various network ranges. For some reason, it
    > always seems to take longer than I expect, and I'm wondering if:
    >
    > 1: I am doing something wrong (this is always a possibility)
    > 2: Nessus has been getting slower over time
    >
    > Specifically, with two laptops (each with 2GHz processor, and upwards
    > of 600MB RAM), I recently tried to scan a range of two class C-size
    > networks, to which I was directly connected via Ethernet. I had already
    > done full nmaps of the hosts (this took about an hour), so I was not
    > running nmap from within Nessus. I found that after over three hours,
    > I had only been able to complete tests on 90-something hosts.
    >
    > This strikes me as unreasonably slow, for bulk automated testing, so
    > first, I'd like to ask if these performance metrics are in line with
    > others' experiences. I'd also solicit any hints people might have
    > to offer on how they optimize performance, any rules of thumb anyone
    > might care to share about estimating times for Nessus runs.
    >
    > Thanks, in advance, to all helpful replies.
    >
    > --Foofus.
    >
    >
    > _______________________________________________
    > Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
    > Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html

    _______________________________________________
    Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
    Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html

  • Next message: winter: "RE: [Full-Disclosure] Possibly a stupid question RPC over HTTP"

    Relevant Pages

    • Re: Nessus 3.0 released
      ... Of course, since Nessus is a _network_ scanner, the bottleneck in the end is the network itself, so a nasl engine which is N times faster does not imply a scanner which is N times faster. ... While we're talking about performance, I'd like to point out that over the last months, we've profiled all the plugins and fixed those which were too slow -- improving the engine makes no sense if you have plugins with long timeouts. ... - In terms of reporting, we do not intend to duplicate efforts such as OSVDB or the Bugtraq database. ... Nessus 3 is to a vulnerability management system what libpcap is to ethereal -- it's a "sensor" which reports data. ...
      (Pen-Test)
    • Re: Vuln Scanning software choices
      ... Now that it appears that Nessus ... not since a year as you need to get the registered plugins to be ... Audit your website security with Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner: ... Cross site scripting and other web attacks before hackers do! ...
      (Pen-Test)
    • Re: MS05-039 Scanner
      ... I successfully scanned a full class-B network with Nessus by doing the ... In the "Plugins" tab, click Disable All, then scroll down to Windows, ... > WLAN by understanding these threats, ... FREE WHITE PAPER - Wireless LAN Security: What Hackers Know That You Don't ...
      (Pen-Test)
    • Re: How do VA scans work technically
      ... The good news is that Nessus plugins are open source, ... Also, Nessus is still free for non commercial use, so your best bet is ... to configure a web server as stealthily you like, ... You'll find some plugins are based on banner grabbing, ...
      (Pen-Test)
    • Nessusd problems on Ubuntu
      ... I installed the debian package for version 3 of nessus on Ubuntu 5.1 ... After updating the plugins when I ... nessusd 3.0.0. ...
      (comp.os.linux.networking)