Tenable Nessus Tips and Tricks

• Plugin 19506 Nessus Scan information : Along with other information, this give you a quick summary of CREDENTIALS YES/NO

If you have a failure, then review other Plugins to find out the cause, Here are some Plugins worth looking at

• 110723 No Credentials Provided
• 110095 Authentication Success
• 104410 Authentication Failure(s) for Provided Credentials
• 110385 Authentication Success Insufficient Access
• 21745 Authentication Failure - Local Checks Not Run
• 117885 Authentication Success with Intermittent Failure
• 10394 Microsoft Windows SMB Log In Possible

Create Nessus Instance in Low End VPS

GCP Free tier:

• 1 non-preemptible e2-micro VM instance per month in one of the following US regions:
  • Oregon: us-west1
  • Iowa: us-central1
  • South Carolina: us-east1
• 30 GB-months standard persistent disk
• 1 GB of outbound data transfer from North America to all region destinations (excluding China and Australia) per month
• Compute Engine free tier does not charge for an external IP address.

Installation steps

1 Create your GCP VM

2 Connect to VM

Update system (Optional)

• apt update -y && apt upgrade -y  

SWAP size increase: (Optional)

• wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/51sec/swap/main/swap.sh && bash swap.sh

3 Install Observability - Ops Agent (Optional)

You will be able to see much more metrics from your VPS, such as memory usage. 

4 Install Nessus using script

Three commands from the cli session: 

• curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/51sec/nessus-special/main/ubuntu.sh -o ubuntu.sh
• chmod +x ubuntu.sh
• ./ubuntu.sh

One line command:

Screenshots for oberability tab and settings page:

Total hours until all plug-ins compiled:  about 9 hours (from 2pm - 11pm)

Update Plugin-set:

How to Quickly Find Out OS

 Plugin ID: 11936