SecurityCenter Now Supports Nessus Agents

We are pleased to announce that SecurityCenter 5.1 will be available later this week. Many SecurityCenter and SecurityCenter Continuous View™ customers have been anticipating the integration with Nessus® agents, and SecurityCenter 5.1 delivers it.

SecurityCenter extends visibility of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations by automatically importing Nessus agent scan data. Agents deliver the detailed internal visibility of credentialed scans to Nessus Cloud or Nessus Manager, and SecurityCenter automatically uploads the scan data. The result: security assurance.

Nessus agents help you:

• Secure the mobile workforce – You no longer need to worry about excluding assets that are offline during a vulnerability scan. A Nessus agent runs the scan locally. Later, when a connection is available, it uploads results to Nessus Manager or Nessus Cloud. From there, SecurityCenter or SecurityCenter CV imports the data.
• Secure systems on complex or bandwidth-limited networks – Agents remove the challenge of scanning systems over segmented or complex networks. Plus, they reduce network bandwidth need, which is important for remote facilities connected by slow networks.
• Remove credential headaches – Many organizations struggle with regular password changes unless a credential manager, such as CyberArk, is used. Nessus agents make host credential headaches a thing of the past.

The list of operating systems supported by Nessus agents continues to grow and currently includes Windows, Mac OS X, and Amazon, Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu Linux.

The integration of Nessus agents with SecurityCenter expands your options to discover assets across your environment, identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, monitor network traffic, and detect suspicious activity. Data sources include:

• Network-based scans – Analyze scanned devices from both external and internal points of view. In many organizations, managing credentials for scans is challenging because credentials change regularly and getting updates to all the people and systems that need them can be burdensome.
• Agent-based scans – Analyze scanned devices locally from an internal point of view.
• Integrations – Leverage data from third-party systems, such as patch management and mobile device management.
• Passive monitoring (SecurityCenter CV) – Monitor and analyze network traffic to detect hosts, devices, connections, services, web applications and vulnerabilities.
• Host activity analysis (SecurityCenter CV) – Capture and analyze events from endpoints, security infrastructure, network devices, and NetFlow so you can see what users are doing, detect changes, and know how systems are being used.

Additional material about Nessus agents and using them with SecurityCenter is readily available:

• SecurityCenter with Nessus agents FAQ
• Webinar: Demonstration of using Nessus Agents for Configuration Audits
• Nessus agent FAQ
• Nessus agent web page
• Nessus agent whitepaper