Nessus is very good tool to manage vulnerabilities or vulnerability scanning. How can I install Nessus into my dpkg based pentest box? My distro my Debian, Ubuntu, Kali etc.

Get License Key

First step is license key. In old days Nessus was provided by Kali distribution as home version. There was no day limit of the Nessus. But the days gone and we are now here. To use Nessus we can download a trial of 7 days or buy. I assume you have completed this step. We can complete this step with this web page

https://www.tenable.com/products/nessus/nessus-professional/evaluate

Download Nessus Package

Good we have license now. We need to get installation package. Nessus supports a lot of different operating systems from Kali to Windows. We download for Kali from this page.

http://www.tenable.com/products/nessus/select-your-operating-system#tos

Install Nessus with dpkg

Our package download is completed. We will install the Nessus with dpkg tool. Our packages full name is Nessus-6.9.0-debian6_amd64.deb . Installation can take some time. Actually installing Nessus is fast but configuration of the plugins take some time. There are a lot of plugins for different systems. For example it took 870 second in my SSD cached Kali virtual machine.

$ dpkg -i Nessus-6.9.0-debian6_amd64.deb (Reading database ... 404642 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack Nessus-6.9.0-debian6_amd64.deb ... Unpacking nessus (6.9.0) ... Setting up nessus (6.9.0) ... Unpacking Nessus Core Components... nessusd (Nessus) 6.9.0 [build M20070] for Linux Copyright (C) 1998 - 2016 Tenable Network Security, Inc Processing the Nessus plugins... [##################################################] All plugins loaded (870sec) - You can start Nessus by typing /etc/init.d/nessusd start - Then go to https://kali:8834/ to configure your scanner Processing triggers for systemd (231-9) ...

Keep in mind that to install we need root privileges. After installation it gives helpfull information about.

Start Nessus Service

After installing Nessus we should do some configuration. Nessus is not started by default. So we should start Nessus with the following command.

$ /etc/init.d/nessusd start Starting Nessus : .

We have started nessusd service but be sure it is running by checking service status.

$ /etc/init.d/nessusd status Nessus is running

Login To Nessus Web Interface

If the Nessus service is working properly we can login to the Nessus from web interface. Nessus uses TCP port 8443 by default but it can be changed. We will also use https for security reasons.

https://localhost:8443

After accessing web page we can enter license key

How To Install Tenable Nessus into Kali? Infografic