Nmap vs. PortSwigger Burp Suite vs. Tenable Nessus

If you're a sysadmin, or anyone who's had to deploy network services, you've almost certainly had to use Nmap at some point or other. Need to see what devices are on your LAN? Nmap can tell you that. Want to check which ports your web server has open to the internet? Nmap is your friend.

Nmap is a powerful command-line tool and has many options that require some reading of documentation to get the best out of (although generally straightforward). If the thought of working at the command-line scares you (presumably not if you're reading this review), then you may want a much simpler tool, or at least check out Zenmap GUI.

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Burp Suite is a good general tool to test websites as long as your website is not too large or you have the time for it to complete. We have some websites that only about five to ten minutes for Burp Suite to complete an attack and a spider only takes about two minutes. Other websites have taken a few hours to complete. I have seen a tester actually run Burp Suite against one of our websites and it took all day to complete.

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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.

• NMap provides a very fast and a very thorough network "sweep" that allows you to quickly map out exactly what's on your network.
• NMap is highly configurable. The "canned" choices are very good in most instances, but using various switches and options, you can create a very specific scan and get exactly the results you're looking for.
• NMap is easy to use. Even a new administrator will be able to use the graphical version (Zenmap) with efficiency right away.

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• The passive scan feature is really awesome, it kind of covers areas that you might miss.
• The CSRF POC is really helpful to my team. It helps development team see the issue and understand it.
• Burp intruder and repeater are the features I myself and my team uses the most as it helps us use our payloads in a variety of different ways.
• Active scan helps the team to ensure coverage for the whole application.

• 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.

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• The GUI version on Nmap could use some improvement with the options that are available to do scans. For example, they could make it easier to select options for the different types of scanning for people who are beginners
• There are no abilities to schedule a scan in the Nmap tool.
• An intensive scan sometimes takes too much time to complete.

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• The interface is a big problem: No matter how many features a software provides you, if the features are not well presented, you will miss most of them when they are actually required. The presentation of the software should be improvised and made more presentable.
• Tutorial videos for beginners: This software lacks a lot in tutorials. A beginner almost wastes most of the time in finding and understanding the features and the implementation of the same. The software vendor should work on providing more in-depth videos so that people can learn and understand the concepts.

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• 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.

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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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Nmap uses are very practical and I don't think there is a better tools for what Nmap does. It is open-sources that therefore there is no cost to use it. It offers a number of benefits, including but not limited to network mapping, port scanning and more. It is very reliable as a network scanning tool.

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The workflow between features like Proxy, Scanner, Intruder, and Repeater feels seamless, making it easy to intercept, manipulate, and analyze web traffic. Despite its advanced capabilities, the tool remains accessible and flexible, which significantly speeds up testing without overwhelming the user.

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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.

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There is a very large support community and a robust selection of add-ons and scripts. Once you get the use down this is one of the most powerful tools and you can find anything you are looking for as far as examples on the web. While not having official support its not lacking by any means.

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BurpSuite does not have an amazing customer support. All the major help that you will find is from public forums and Google. Although you will find all the required information on Google, still at time professional support helps you solve the problem in much less time and make your operations go smoothly.

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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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Alternatives to Nmap (other IP scanners) are often much more limited in what they can do; They often only allow you to scan a specific subset of ports or a limited number of IP addresses in one command. Nmap is unrestricted in that regard. What makes Nmap stand out above the rest, is the complete network analysis package you get with it. It allows IP scanner, network deep-dives, hardware analysis, vulnerability analysis, encryption detailing, and so much more, in one free application

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Each tool is specific and are good for what they do. While Burp Suite can perform some level of the same functions, somehow security consultants prefer these tools as additional to the Burp Suite. Maybe due to open source and easy setup when compared to Burp Suite. But Burp Suite allows for one tool for many templates for each project.

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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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• Nmap with Wireshark is free, so it's been a great combo team to gather info and test.
• It's allowed us to avoid fines from false positives and to fix actual issues ourselves.
• Great for finding hosts, helps keep the network secure.

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• Scanned 100% of the orgs public facing web sites with a small team of analysts.
• Provided a reputable second opinion source to back up the other product in use i.e. Webinspect.
• Pro version $350 is amazing ROI, considering the thwarted attacks and that it's competition is priced in the tens of thousands last I checked.
• No successful hacks. Q.E.D. :-)

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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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