AlienVault OSSIM was an open source Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). AlienVault was acquired by AT&T Cybersecurity, now LevelBlue, and OSSIM is no longer available for sale.
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Tenable Nessus
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Tenable headquartered in Columbia offers Nessus, a vulnerability scanning and security assessment solution used to analyze an entity's security posture, vulnerability testing, and provide configuration assessments.
$2,790
Tenable Vulnerability Management
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Vulnerability management specialist Tenable offers their cloud application and container security platform Tenable Web App Scanning (formerly Tenable.io), a vulnerability management tool that emphasizes visibility of web applications, automatic scanning, and a unified view of cloud infrastructure and possible inconsistencies indicating a vulnerability.
AlienVault OSSIM has the upper ante in initial deployment price, being that it's open source. Also, with perhaps the exception of SolarWinds, it has a lower optimal requirements for onsite deployment, hence your OPEX won't be hit very hard by investing in new hardware to suit …
Nessus is the smallest product in the Tenable stable and is also the first vulnerability scanner to be created almost 20 years ago. Great tool for once off scans. But you need the other products if you want real time monitoring etc
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose Tenable Nessus
Comparing other products, Nessus has a lot of plus points. Not only for PCIDSS, Nessus is great for other compliance bodies such as HIPAA, NIST etc.
If this is your first experience with a SIEM, this one can get you started. Take the time to learn the ins and outs of the product and you'll most likely be satisfied with it if your company is an SMB. If you need compliance reports, OSSIM is too small for you, you'll need to go with USM or USM Anywhere.
It is an excellent tool for scanning servers, workstations, and network devices to identify missing patches and misconfiguration; we regularly use it to confirm patch effectiveness after the update; it also helps us for preparing audits such as iso 27001, and regulatory requirements, it also helps us to identify open ports and services that violate security.
I've been using this product since it began as an open source product, I really like it and for the money, I think it's probably the best choice for most companies who need a product like this. Over the years I've seen the interface change quite a bit and sometimes I think it's a bit unclear how to do certain things and the different packages can be confusing, these are the only reasons I'm giving it a 9 instead of a 10.
Asset discovery. Once installed in a centric, network-accessible server, OSSIM can poll all your endpoints with common protocols (SSH, SNMP, WMI) to detect and discover site-wide assets to monitor. You only need to group them by your own criteria once added to the product.
SIEM Event Correlation. You can define quite complex correlation rules to detect possible suspicious or malicious actions or attempts in your network, in order to categorize them as real threats or as false positives, thus streamlining your risk assessment and management.
Ease of installation. The entire AlienVault OSSIM is self-contained in an ISO file, which can be burned into a DVD or just mounted in your server of choice (physical or virtual) for deployment. The installation process is automated and quote verbosed, with options for static IP, email messaging and others.
Ease of access. Being AlienVault OSSIM a self-contained appliance, it can be accessed via web by any device that supports a web browser, being that desktops, workstation, mobile devices, etc. The OSSIM dashboard and other features are automatically rearranged to adapt to the particular device being in use.
Nessus is best at performing vulnerability scans, in fact, it gives findings and moreover accurate findings of the assessments. It does not do penetration testing or exploit the vulnerabilities because it is concerned about scanning the systems/applications.
In fact, Nessus has multiple profiles/policies to perform different types of scans such as, scans oriented for PCI-DSS, malware scans, web application scans, bad shell shock detection scan to name a few.
Nessus has the ability to classify the vulnerabilities into risk-based categories from critical to even informational which I think is one of the things that separates Nessus from other vulnerability scanners.
The tool has lots of options for setting up before scanning any device, this methodology could be simplified further with default configuration for various devices predefined, anyhow we can use this technique by making use of policies.
For advanced users we cannot disable the plugins inside the plugin groups, we can enable the whole set of plugins at a time, for few hundreds its ok, but thousands of plugins are of waste of resource and time.
Expensive - You do pay a slight premium for the best product in the space.
Asset management is difficult to work with if you have a lot of asset turnover, the license can be ''held'' for 3-6 months after the asset is gone from your environment.
Nessus is best and easy to use application for Vulnerabilities finding and reporting, it has multiple platforms and wide scope covering almost all devices for security improvement so far, thus we are very likely to continue its services.
AlienVault OSSIM is far easy to use and manage - provided you know what you're doing. As any SIEM application, there is some background knowledge required in order to take advantage of the product's functionalities, such as the log correlation and analysis. Other than that, the application is quite usable and robust.
Tenable Nessus is a great product and provides a lot of value, but it is difficult to set up and use and the amount of data it generates can be overwhelming. It does help us prioritize based on the severity of the detection, however there are sometimes mitigating factors that we have implemented that Nessus does not account for, which causes lots of noise in the reports.
Everything is done through MSSP and installation pro services. Once those hours are burned up, then you're on your own without a lot of help. Typically the pro services hours aren't enough to get past 60 days and MSSP are hit and miss. We had a miss for installation helpers.
I haven't needed to contact support yet. But issues are easily solved with a quick internet search which means support and by extension, the larger community are involved and knowledgeable.
Support is usually really great at walking you through any steps you need to take when you get stuck on something. There are a few false positives and errors that have come up over the years that required their help to get through. Unfortunately, the steps required to diagnose some problems are more tedious than I think should be necessary. (IE: SQL instances can throw errors that clog up your logs because one plugin affects it in a certain way. The process to diagnose this is to watch timestamps of plugins in a log while monitoring the SQL logs at the same time and using your best guess as to what is causing it.)
Originally my organization leveraged alien value due to the lower cost of entry and ability to manage it as a service provider. Unfortunately, after several years of working with this tool, it became unwieldy to use as it felt that almost every useful report had to be created by hand. As other tools have come out with the ability to do automated responses such as Stellar Data processor, we have begun to evaluate alternatives.
Sometimes when we identify a vulnerability with Nessus that has an exploit, we made a proof of concept with Metasploit in order to show to the IT managers the importance of the software/hardware hardening.
Tenable.io has a comparable set of features, with excellent support and a competitive price. After less than desirable experiences with another company, we moved to Tenable and haven't looked back since.
Nessus certainly has a positive impact while me while performing my job, either as security research, or performing vulnerability assessments for clients. It gives a lot of information about the system/application after performing scans. The number of false positives is also less compared to other vulnerability scanners.
The professional edition is very useful as policy templates available in this edition are very handy and useful even to perform compliance scan like PCI DSS scan.
Also, the ability to export the scan results into reports in formats like HTML, PDF is very useful which could be for performing system/application reviews.
Since this is a requirement for our PCI compliance and the cost is relatively low, the ROI isn't really something we need to think too much about, Tenable's pricing is fair and affordable.
