

Other policies may only look for web application vulnerabilities when we run it on the targeted website. Like policy related to databases can be used to identify potential vulnerabilities in database servers. These policies are used for scanning specific types of vulnerabilities. These plugins are very helpful in finding vulnerabilities in Windows, Mac, Linux, Databases & Webservers. System Administrators can set up policies, scans, and view reports after logging into the Nessus dashboard. It uses different kinds of plugins to identify the vulnerabilities on the targeted machine.Īt the time of writing this comparison guide, Nessus has more than 159000 plugins are available which get updated in every 24 hours. Nessus is a web-based application that is installed on our local server. Nessus is a vulnerability scanning tool which is developed by Tenable, Inc. It also scans for open ports like NMAP but in addition, it also detects the running services on those open ports and gives us information that if these ports have any kind of potential security vulnerabilities which help system administrators to identify and fix those vulnerabilities. These NSE scripts are divided into several categories like discovery, brute, exploit, malware, etc. NMAP also has a scripting engine that allows us to create complex NSE scripts. But it is highly recommended to use NMAP instead of ZENMAP because it has lots of different features and also it is relatively fast from ZENMAP. ZENMAP is a GUI version of NMAP so it is not as powerful as NMAP. If you are using Linux then you can install ZENMAP using this command: Command: sudo apt-get install zenmapĪfter installation type this to open ZENMAP: Command: sudo zenmap How to use NMAP?Īlthough NMAP is a command-line tool its GUI version is also available named ZENMAP. Which can be easily downloaded from its official website. NMAP also attempts to gather more information about the open ports like running services, versions, etc. After the scanning is done using NMAP, we will have a list of live hosts with their open ports. NMAP uses a combination of probe requests to discover the IP of active hosts. The main purpose of this tool is to help in mapping an entire network easily and to find open ports and services. It was developed by Gordon Lyon in September 1997. NMAP is used by penetration testers and network administrators to find which devices are running on their network, discovering open ports and services, and detect vulnerabilities. It is a free and open-source command-line network scanning tools which are used to scan IP address and ports in the network.

If we want to compare these two tools, then we will have to understand the way they work, only then we will be able to differentiate the NMAP VS NESSUS properly.
