Rollout: Tenable's Nessus 3.0

Nessus 3 was recently tested by Network Computing Magazine. Their analysts used Nessus 3 subscribed to a Direct Feed to audit the configuration of a remote Windows system. We felt the article was very accurate and made several references to the documentation and tools which can help users quickly create custom policies.

One of the tools mentioned in the article was the Windows Nessus Policy Creator (WNPC). The WNPC allows a user to create an audit file for Nessus 3 from a "gold" system and then audit other systems with this audit file. We've written about this tool previously and readers can also see a video of the tool here if they like.

The analysts doing the testing for the article also wrote about some of the issues they ran into while configuring a remote Windows system for analysis. If you have a non-domain Windows system and want to enable this sort of auditing, follow these steps:

1. In the Microsoft Management Console, open the Group Policy and select Security Settings.
2. Open Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts element and the select Properties.
3. In this dialog, select Classic - local users authenticate as themselves and click OK to save this.

The above content was extracted from the paper, "Nessus Credentials Checks for UNIX and Windows".

You can read the full article here and in the September 21, 2006 printed issue of Network Computing Magazine.