Nessus 3.2 released

New Features

 Support for IPv6 targets (for the Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Mac OS X flavors)
 Support for limiting the number of active TCP sessions in parallel (per host, per scan, per scanner)
 A new nessuscmd tool that lets one run quick scans from the command-line
 A new nessus-update tool that lets one update the Nessus engine from the command-line (on select platforms)
 The Nessus daemon can now detect hosts which are being turned off during the scan and stop scanning them
 The Nessus daemon can now detect when the network is congested and change the TCP settings appropriately
 Nessus user account access control rules are now more granular and can be used to prevent the scanner from connecting to certain ports or to use certain plugins
 The nessus command-line tool can read and write to and from a .nessus file
 Improved WMI support (see http://cgi.tenablesecurity.com/tenable/WMI.html)

Improvements

 New nasl functions can dynamically alter the plugin selection
 Improved memory management by NASL scripts
 Support for more SSH ciphers (AES-128/AES-192/AES-256/3DES)
 Improved service detection — a new service detection plugin (find_service.nasl) replaces the old find_service.nes
 On Unix systems, the initial plugin processing now takes advantage of multi-core CPUs
 nessusd.rules now let you tune which plugins are forbidden for a scan, and which ports can or can’t be connected to

Improvements to the Nessus TCP Scanner

 Simplified preferences — a new cursor option (firewall detection) lets the user better tune the scanner when running against a firewall or a slow link
 Improved RTT estimation and congestion detection by regularly probing unfiltered ports

Windows Specific changes

 NessusGUI.exe has been removed in favor of NessusClient.exe which is now bundled with the installer
 It is now possible to authenticate the clients via SSL certificates KB saving and other options common to the UNIX version of Nessus are supported on the Windows platform
 Installer now lets the user decide which components to install (server, client or both)
 When the scanner is registered with either a Direct or Registered feed, it will automatically fetch and process the new updates from nessus.org every 24 hours

Mac OS X Specific changes

 Nessus Client 3.2 includes a fixed a memory leak that occurred in the 3.0 version
 Nessus 3.2.0 now is a real universal binary

Linux platforms

Nessus 3.2 is now available for the following Linux platforms :

 Debian 4 (i386 and amd64)
 Fedora 7 (i386)
 Fedora 8 (i386)
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 and 5 (i386)
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86_64)
 SuSE Linux 9.3 and 10.0 (i386)

NessusClient 3.2.0 specific changes

 A new ’network’ tab when editing a policy, lets the user control some Nessus 3.2 specific options such as maximum TCP sessions. Fixed several bugs which might cause the client to crash in the middle of a scan.
 Opening a large .nessus file in the client now takes less time.