These plugs are often specific to detecting a common virus or vulnerability. Its also provides a plug-in interface, and many free plug-ins are available from the Nessus plug-in site.

Nessus is very extensible, providing a scripting language for you to write tests specific to your system once you become more familiar with the tool. Unlike other scanners, Nessus does not make assumptions about your server configuration (such as assuming that port 80 must be the only web server) that can cause other scanners to miss real vulnerabilities.

If you are familiar with other network vulnerability scanners, you might be wondering what advantages Nessus has over them.

It does this by running over 1200 checks on a given computer, testing to see if any of these attacks could be used to break into the computer or otherwise harm it. Nessus is a remote security scanning tool, which scans a computer and raises an alert if it discovers any vulnerabilities that malicious hackers could use to gain access to any computer you have connected to a network.

How to use nessus