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Nessus Professional API

Nessus Professional API

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Aug 22, 2024
2 min read

When integrating the platform with one or more Internet-facing ‘standalone' Tenable Nessus Professional scanners, the following information must be supplied to the platform to enable scan results to be retrieved from the scanner(s). The platform will communicate with each scanner’s API to retrieve scan results.

The guidance in this section assumes you have at least one Internet-facing Nessus Professional Scanner deployed. If you have deployed one or more standalone Nessus Professional Scanners on your internal network(s), and you want to integrate these scanners with the platform, please refer to article Connecting the Platform to Internally Hosted Scanners

IMPORTANT NOTE: A ‘standalone' Nessus Professional Scanner is operated and administered independently of Tenable’s centralised management platforms such as Tenable.SC or Tenable VM . Nessus scanning engines that are deployed, linked and controlled via Tenable.SC or Tenable VM are not supported with this scanner integration method.

Please refer to http://Tenable.IO WAS & and http://Tenable.IO VM section further down in this Knowledgebase.

Adding an External Nessus Professional Vulnerability Scanner

All fields below are mandatory:

  • Name - a meaningful name/ID of the scanner within your platform tenant

  • Type - leave this defined as Nessus Professional Vulnerability Scanner

  • Host - this must be the full URL to the Nessus Professional Web Console. The full protocol designation and TCP port definition must also be include in the URL - e.g. <https://<scanner_ip>:8834>

  • Access Key - taken/copied from the Nessus Web Console

  • Secret Key - taken/copied from the Nessus Web Console

Select Create Scanner once all information has been populated.

The platform will then perform a check with the defined scanner to establish if the supplied configuration is valid.

Scanner Configuration Success
Scanner Configuration Error

For valid configurations the platform will display a green banner and return to the previous Nessus Vulnerability Scanners window.

Should the platform return a red banner during the configuration checks, this indicates an error with communicating/validating the scanner configuration. Please check your Host definition and API credentials are correct and then select Create Scanner again.

Please ensure you select Save Changes to commit the scanner configuration and making the scanner available within your the platform tenant for importing results.

You will need to repeat the above steps for each additional Nessus Professional scanner that you wish to integrate with the platform.

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