Re: Scheduling Nessus Scans

On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 09:11:59AM -0500, Bledsoe, Horace W. wrote:

> Hello all, I am a newbie to Linux and was wondering what would be the
> best approach to schedule a nessus scans from a suse 10 box?

As Tim Doty suggested, you could use cron to handle this. "man nessus"
will give you some basic information about running scans from a
commandline, but basically it will look something like this:

  nessus -c ~/.nessusrc $nessusd_host 1241 \
    $nessus_user $nessus_pass \
    $file_with_targets $output_file

> It sounds like cron jobs are able to kick off the process, but can it
> specify plugins, authentication, IPs to scan, etc? Or, would I need a
> script for cron to run at a certain time?

Most likely, you will need to have a separate script. You will likely
want to use it in conjunction with one of the update-nessusrc scripts to
ensure that only the plugins you want are actually run.

Btw, Tenable has a commercial product, called Security Center 3, that
provides a web-based interface for configuration scans, reporting their
results, and much more. Information about the product is available here:

  http://www.tenablesecurity.com/products/sc.shtml


George
-- 
theall@tenablesecurity.com
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