HackerOne vs. Tenable Nessus

It is one of the good platforms for security researchers to submit bugs and other vulnerabilities, it however, has some challenges, in terms of un-verified and duplicate submissions.

Incentivized

Nessus is perfectly suitable for performing comprehensive vulnerability assessment scans being a vulnerability scanner. It is less appropriate for performing penetration testing since it is not a penetration testing tool, it does not have the ability and modules to exploit the vulnerabilities of the system.

Incentivized

• Filter for spammy bug reports
• Nice central interface
• Payment/reward system is nice

Incentivized

• With Nessus we can find the missing critical patches for a server or workstations.
• Nessus points out any vulnerable or outdated software Technologies used in the system, thus eliminating any chances for security flaws being turned up.
• Nessus typically points any configuration level issues in accordance with the OWASP guidelines. Even the configuration of SSL related which are most of the time handled by some vendors or 3rd parties.
• Nessus not only lists out these Vulnerabilities but describes clearly the vulnerabilities in details with its thousands of plugins updated regularly, the tool also recommends solution with practical details of easy implementation.

Incentivized

• A lot of duplicate bugs get reported, although it does offer automatic suggestion of previously reported bugs that may be duplicates, it is far from perfect.
• Anyone can report bugs, a lot of them are not verified before submission. This sometimes leads to a lot of time spent in verifying if the bug is really actionable.
• Each submission has to be treated with equal potential, a lot of time, some time gets invested in vulnerabilities that aren't as important as some others.

Incentivized

• Could use an upgrade within reports.
• Scans can take a long time to complete. Have to break them down in small sections.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It's very much a plug and play application that the user can go into with limited knowledge and set-up scans in minutes.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

These were very close and we liked HackerOne better. For a time we did have both and we felt the need to consolidate the information into one platform and end of life our internal offering. Overall we've been fairly happy with HackerOne.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Bugs that can't be tracked internally are submitted by external researchers, which is an important factor for security vulnerabilities.
• Even if the bugs reported are duplicates, there still is provision to award reputation points, that keep the researchers engaged.
• It also requires a lot of verification and validation, as a lot of the submissions are unverified to begin with.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized