January 2010
Beginner to intermediate
936 pages
27h 45m
English
Content preview from Mac® Security Bible
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
21.1. Using Nessus
Nessus, widely regarded as the most comprehensive network vulnerability scanner currently available, is a commercial program distributed by Tenable Network Security (www.nessus.org). Earlier versions of Nessus were open source, and while the current version isn't, it's available at no charge for personal use. Commercial use requires a ProfessionalFeed Subscription, which costs $1,200 per year. The software is available for Mac OS X as well as Windows and several flavors of Linux. And unlike the other software described in this chapter, Nessus includes a full Mac OS X graphical interface rather than relying on the command line, a web browser, or X11 for user interaction.
21.1.1. Nessus overview
The overall design of Nessus takes a bit of getting used to, and it requires users to jump through a few hoops in order to get started. However, once you've done that, day-to-day operation of the software is quite simple, with all results provided in clear English.
The software consists of two modules: the Nessus Server and the Nessus Client. The server module performs the scanning, while the client module lets you interact with the server — sending it instructions and displaying the results it delivers. You can run the server and the client on the same computer or on different ones. If you're doing extensive testing on a large number of computers, you might want to install the client on some machine other than your regular Mac because it could adversely affect your Mac's ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.