From the course: Security Testing: Vulnerability Management with Nessus

Nessus editions - Nessus Tutorial

From the course: Security Testing: Vulnerability Management with Nessus

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Nessus editions

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- [Instructor] Nessus is a product with a long history. It began as an open source project all the way back in 1998, and quickly became a very popular tool for security scanning. In 2005, Tenable Network Security, the owners of Nessus, changed it from an open source license to a closed source license and began charging for some uses of the product. Over time, this has evolved into Nessus being available in two additions. The Nessus Essentials edition, which remains free for use by the security community, and the Nessus Professional edition. The Nessus Essentials edition is powerful and a great way to learn Nessus. It's what we'll be using in this course. However, it's important to know that Nessus Essentials is limited to scanning 16 IP addresses. You won't be able to scan large networks with this version of the tool. If you do plan to use Nessus on a larger scale, you'll need to purchase a license for Nessus Professional. It's priced on a per-scanner basis and you'll find current pricing information on the Tenable website. Tenable also offers some other products that build upon Nessus. These include the Tenable Security Center known as Tenable.sc. This product provides you with a dashboard for tracking vulnerabilities across scanners. And Tenable.io offers a cloud-based approach to vulnerability scanning based upon the Nessus platform. In this course I'll assume that you're using the standard Nessus product.

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