Nessus Vulnerability Scanner Tutorial (Cyber Security Tools)

you want to know how bad you are at security in this video i'm going to show you one of the best tools at discovering security vulnerabilities so that you can be more prepared for a job in cyber security but first if this is the first time that we're meeting welcome to my channel my name is john good and here i get to spread my passion for cyber security training tips and tricks and career advice to help you go further remember to smash the thumbs up to like this video hit the subscribe button and the bell icon so you don't miss future content and make sure to leave a comment for the youtube algorithm if you like my training and you want more check out my website at johngood.com to get access to training courses without distracting interruptions or advertisements make sure that you also sign up for my newsletter using the link in the description to get your free copy of my ebook on cyber security careers you can also join me on the discord server the link is in the description alright let's get into the video when was the last time that you had to install updates on your computer one of the things that will always be consistent in security is that new bugs and vulnerabilities are found every day being able to identify vulnerabilities or weaknesses in our networks and track them throughout their life cycle until they're resolved is crucial to keeping a network secure after all attackers have the same bulletins and vulnerability release information that we do so it becomes a race to fix that vulnerability before an attacker can exploit it have you ever heard of the cis controls the cis controls are critical controls that an organization needs to secure their network continuous vulnerability management happens to be the number three critical control that an organization has to have on their network if you haven't heard of the top 20 controls what you can do is go to ciisecurity.org and they have a list of all the different controls if you want to look more into this but right here at number three we have continuous vulnerability management let's be honest as you'll begin to see the vulnerability management life cycle can take a lot of time and resources in order to be successful we have to know the systems that we have on our networks then we have to go scan those systems and identify vulnerabilities we have to determine the vulnerability severity so how likely it is to be exploited and then we actually have to track that vulnerability through its remediation luckily there's commercial tools that exist to assist us in the vulnerability management process in this particular video we're going to cover nessus which is a popular vulnerability scanning tool nessus has two different components that make it actually work first we have the client and this refers to that web interface that we actually use as the administrators or users and we can interact with the system the schedule scans generate reports and all kinds of other features the other component is the server component this is what actually performs those scans and then it sends the results over to the web interface or the client with vulnerability scanning there's four major steps the first step is port scanning this is where the scanner is going to actually go out there determine which hosts are alive and which ports are open on those hosts then we have service detection this is where nessus is going to send out probes to find out which application is running on that port the version number and the actual name of it then we have vulnerability identification this is where nessus is going to compare what it discovers about each service detected on each host and then it's going to actually compare it against its database of known vulnerabilities of those applications and version numbers and then finally we have the probing step this is where nessus is actually going to try to further identify if there's false positives or identify if that vulnerability actually exists now that we know some of the basics about vulnerability management and vulnerability scanning i want to actually take you through the nessus product by installing it and running some scans so you can actually see what it looks like for this demo we're going to be using the free non-commercial use license that you can also use at home if you want to practice along before we get started i want to make sure that we're on the same page as far as a disclaimer so everybody say it with me i will not scan networks that i do not have written permission to scan okay we agree if you scan networks that you do not have permission to scan you can actually get into a lot of legal trouble so make sure that you're only scanning systems that you have permission to scan all right so let's go over to the computer now so we can install nessus so the first thing that you're going to want to do is go to google and search for nessus and nessus is made by tenable which is the producing company here we'll click this first link and the nessus essentials is the one that we're actually going to use for our home use you can see that there's a few other options that you would use in an actual corporate environment we'll scroll down here and we'll go to download so you will have to actually register to get an activation code from them so i will go ahead and do this and then i'll check back in once we enter our information it will take us to the download page and then we just have to pick the version that we want to use accept the terms and go ahead install i am running centos here so yours might look different depending on which operating system you're running but again we're going to install it i'll enter my password here and now that we have it installed we need to go ahead and start it up here so i already have a command prompt window open back here and so i will change to root and start the service all right great so nessus is started now so when you're actually going to connect to nessus after you've installed it you need to go to your local host and then port 8834 is the website you'll get this error because it doesn't have an official signed certificate so hit advanced and then add exception and confirm security exception now we'll be brought to this webpage where we need to select our specific version again we did nessus essentials so continue and then we already have an activation code so we can skip this step and we'll enter our activation in here so i'm going to enter mine in and then hit continue and then i'll check back in once we're done with that now that we've entered our activation code we need to create a user account so i'm going to create the username root and the password will be super secret and then hit submit now this account is the account that you'll log into when you need to run a scan what it's going to do now is it's going to go ahead and download the plugins it's going to update itself so that we have all the available signatures and the most up-to-date database for when we perform our scans so we will let this run and then we'll check back in once we're done with that all right and now we have successfully installed nessus to our local system with the nessus essential license i hope that you're enjoying the content in this video so far if you are make sure to hit the thumbs up to like this video and if you think of any questions let me know down in the comment section below also remember that this training and full courses can be found on my website at johngood.com without distracting interruptions or advertisements all right let's get back to the content so now that we've installed nessus the first thing that we need to do is we need to actually run a discovery scan it's called and this is going to discover all the hosts on our network so i'm actually only going to scan the localhost because that's this system right now that i'm running this on so i'll enter the ip address and hit submit and nessus will go ahead and scan for potential hosts it finds my host so if we used a full network or mini host then it would obviously list them in here but again with this home license you only have a 16 host limit that you can scan and then we will hit run scan all right and this is going to do a basic network scan all right now that scan is complete so we can actually drill down into the different vulnerabilities that it found it will tell you some of the information early on before it actually finishes so you can look at the information before it finishes but you can see here that we have this nice pie chart here 92 percent of the findings were informational six percent were medium two percent were low so if we want to drill down into that we can go up here and click the vulnerabilities and it will tell us the individual issues so we're going to go into this http issue here and we can see there's a medium vulnerability and we're going to click on that one you can see that it gives more information about that individual vulnerability and what it found so in this particular one this remote web server supports the trace and or track methods with this i just installed a default installation of apache so it's going to have some of these regular default findings in this vulnerability finding you can also see this output so it gives more information about it and you also get some article links you can go check out as well the medium rating or the medium risk is based on what nessus believes it is okay so that's where that medium comes from then you also get modified and the published date so you can see when they updated the signature and just a little bit more information you also get the port that it was found on so adtcp www and the host that it was found on so again localhost this system that i'm actually running it on now you also get some of these cves over here as well so if i click on this original one go ahead and open that in a different window that will take us to the actual database where it describes its findings and i definitely would check this out this is going to be a great database where you have a lot of different information this is the nist nvd website and this has all the different vulnerabilities that are out there oh and again that was found for the specific vulnerability the specific cve you found it on the actual vulnerability finding it links directly to it when you're looking for more vulnerability information you can also go to the vendor website because of course they're going to release when there's a new patch and potential security issues and that's in addition to what we can use on the scanner and that national vulnerability database which is that website i showed you by nist question of the day what are some alternative tools to nessus or vulnerability management that exist out there i want you to actually go out and do some research and let me know down in the comment section below what some of these alternative tools are in this video we walk through the installation operation and reporting in the nessus vulnerability scanning tool we also went through different ways that you can research vulnerabilities their severity and ways to actually mitigate them or remove them from our environments remember vulnerability management is a very time-consuming and ongoing process that only works when we can track the vulnerabilities that exist through their mitigation or when we actually eliminate them from our networks as always make sure to leave a like comment and subscribe check out my website at johngood.com for more training without distracting interruptions or advertisements and i'll see you next [Music] time [Music] you

Channel: Jon Good

Views: 59,843

Rating: 4.9140272 out of 5

Keywords: cybersecurity, cyber security, nessus, vulnerability scanner, vulnerability assessment, tenable, nessus tutorial for beginners, nessus vulnerability scanner, nessus tutorial, vulnerability management, vulnerability scanning with nessus, information assurance, nessus scan, pci dss compliance, data protection, security center, vulnerability scanning, information security, computer security, vulnerability, infosec, nessus vulnerability scanner tutorial, how to use nessus

Id: x87gbgQD4eg

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020