performing-vulnerability-scanning-with-nessus

Automate Nessus vulnerability scanning by using the REST API to create, launch, and monitor scans that identify CVEs, misconfigurations, and missing patches. You can configure authenticated and unauthenticated checks to detect local vulnerabilities across your network infrastructure.

Authenticated Nessus scans use administrative credentials to detect local vulnerabilities and missing patches, while unauthenticated scans perform external checks without login. You can configure credentialed scans and automatically fallback to unauthenticated checks when credentials fail.

Export Nessus scan results in CSV, PDF, or HTML formats via the REST API for compliance reporting. You can correlate findings with CVE and CVSS metrics, validate false positives, and group results by remediation action to produce prioritized reports for PCI-DSS and HIPAA audits.

You need either Nessus Professional or Nessus Expert with up-to-date plugins to run credentialed scans via the REST API. Both support scan creation, monitoring, export, and authenticated status checks, provided you have administrative credentials for the target hosts.

Validate Nessus authentication status per host by checking the authenticated scan results through the REST API after the scan completes. This confirms whether administrative credentials were successfully applied to each host to detect local vulnerabilities and missing patches.

Unauthenticated Nessus scans are limited to detecting external vulnerabilities and misconfigurations without local system access. They cannot identify missing patches, default credentials, or local misconfigurations that require administrative login privileges to detect.