Vulnerability Scanning

Overview

To address the threats and attack methods relevant to your business, it's important to find vulnerabilities before the attacker do. In this section, you’ll learn how to conduct a vulnerability scan.

Using Vulnerability Scanners

Vulnerability scanners are tools that can be used to search assets for security holes. Nessus, the tools used in this class for example, is an open-source scanner that uses the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) model to find issues and efficiently conduct further research and analysis on the findings.

To run a scan, you'll need to identify the target you want to scan and establish what kinds of security issues you are seeking to find. There are also other factors to take into consideration such as what type of results report you'd like to see or what ports you want to include in the test. There are hundreds of configurations that can be changed to fine-tune a scan and the options will vary from scanning tool to scanning tool.

Reading Scan Results

The purpose of conducting the scan is so that you can find and fix vulnerabilities. All of the issues found by the scanner are delivered in the form of a vulnerability report. The scan results can be delivered in a variety of formats, including PDF, CSV, HMTL dashboard, and more. While the details of the report will vary from tool to tool, common details include are:

• Hostname or IP address
• Name and description of finding
• Severity of finding
• Mitigation recommendation, if available

To learn more about Nessus scanning, reference the Nessus user guide here: https://docs.tenable.com/nessus/8_0/Content/Resources/PDF/Nessus_8_0.pdf