Patrick Bareiss

In this blog post, I will explain how to install Nessus on CentOS 7. Nessus is one of the most popular vulnerability scanner in the market. Nessus provides Nessus Home allowing you to scan your personal network with up to 16 IP adresses per scanner. This is perfect for your home lab. In order to use Nessus Home, you have to apply for a Nessus Home Key under the following link:

https://www.tenable.com/products/nessus-home

After applying for a Nessus Home Key, you will receive an Email with an activation code, which is used later in this blog post. After that, you can download Nessus under the following link:

https://www.tenable.com/downloads/nessus

Open a terminal and use the following command to install Nessus:

rpm -ivh Nessus--es7.x86_64.rpm

In order to access the default port 8834 of Nessus, a new firewall rule in CentOS is necessary:

firewall-cmd --add-port=8834/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

Now, we are ready to start Nessus:

systemctl start nessusd

Connect to the scanner using your browser with the following url:

https://[ip or hostname]:8834

In the first step of the configuration, you have to create an account:

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In the second step of the configuration, you have to register your scanner with the activation code, which you received by E-Mail:

Afterwards, Nessus is initializing. This can take some time.

When the initializing phase is finished, you can start to scan your network.

Thank you for reading. I hope this blog post helped you to setup your Nessus vulnerability scanner.