thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Security Operations · Foundational

Nessus

A widely used commercial vulnerability scanner from Tenable that uses plugins to detect vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

Definition

Nessus plugins, identified by IDs, test for specific CVEs and configuration issues. It supports credentialed scanning, compliance audits against CIS benchmarks and agent-based assessment. Tenable Vulnerability Management and Tenable Security Center manage Nessus at scale. OpenVAS/Greenbone is an open-source alternative.

Example

Running a Nessus Advanced Scan with Windows credentials against a server subnet.

Exam tip

Recognize Nessus, Qualys, OpenVAS and InsightVM as vulnerability scanners in tool-identification questions.

Related terms