Nessus Reviews

Summary: Despite how displeased I was with the free trial (they're like a crack dealer, offer you enough taste to get you hooked, then demand exorbitant amounts of cash to give you your fix) I was able to convince my organization to purchase a license. It has been immensely helpful in identifying vulnerabilities and has enabled our configuration management and system deployment standards to be much more extensive.

Positive: In depth vulnerability scanning with very usable results in easy to read formats and reports that you can drill down into. Very detailed information for how quick the scan is.

Negative: The free trial sucked. Not only is it limited to 7 days, but you can't even try the full feature set for that 7 days. It's limited to reporting on the first 16 devices it detects. Unfortunately on my network, it didn't make it to any servers before hitting that limit, so I only got info on workstations, a printer and a credit card reader. At least give me 1 full scan of my network so I can compare workstations to servers, or give me the ability to go back and pick certain IP addresses to scan, maybe via csv file upload?

Summary: When your enterprise has thousands of devices distributed across different business units and in different locations, you really do need something like Nessus. It can identify threats in the wild, but we mainly appreciated its ability to identify configurations.

Positive: 2018 was a year of almost back-to-back computer security issues. First you had computer systems admins scrambling to protect against ransomware following the prior year's high profile Wannacry attacks, then you got hit with Meltdown and Spectre. With the latter two it became super important to make sure all devices were patched, which wasn't without its own headaches - the patches reduced CPU performance. Anyways, we used Nessus to scan all the devices connected to our network and identify which ones needed the patches.

Negative: It's supposed to be possible to create custom scanning rules and similar, it's called a Nessus Plugin policy, but we were shortstaffed at the time and none of us could really get it to work. So can't say it's the most intuitive.