Kali Linux vs. Tenable Nessus

Kali is quite honestly appropriate for use on a Test Lab, a Virtual Machine, it will even run on a Raspberry Pi. It is the most popular tool used in most all training courses. It can be uses in home labs, work labs and production environments to perform real life scans for vulnerabilities among other things. It is the most popular tool for Cybersecurity tool.

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.

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• Provides high security.
• Does great job with penetration testing.
• Has good number of testing tools with in.

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• 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• Nessus points out any vulnerable or outdated software Technologies used in the system, thus eliminating any chances for security flaws being turned up.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.

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• Usage wise, it is tough for use by beginners. Can be improved.
• With Kali Linux have noticed driver related issues especially with Nvidia graphics cards.
• Kali Linux can be improved for use as a day to day OS.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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The hard feature to be beat Kali with is the amount of preinstalled tools. I.e. Ubuntu is great but you would have to install each and every tool separately

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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.

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• Till now Kali Linux have not made a single penny negative impact on our companies business , its so powerful and useful at the same time for our company.

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• 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.

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