This article will endeavor to explain a Nessus report and how to analyze it.

Understanding how and why vulnerabilities exist in software is important to being able to analyze the final scan report, and this article uses a number of examples to illustrate various important concepts. In some cases these may be older, more common examples instead of the "latest" day zero vulnerabilities. There are several reasons for this. First, I don't currently know of any awe inspiring "zero day" vulnerabilities to wow the reader with. Second, the stated examples typically have a large body of information available for the reader to do further research, and I will list a few sites providing a good start for such research. Third, although some of these examples may be older, they are still quite common and unfortunately most readers will still encounter them when scanning.

By Harry Anderson at SecurityFocus.

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• Software: Nessus