History
The "Nessus" Project was started by Renaud Deraison in 1998 to provide to the Internet community a free remote security scanner. On October 5, 2005, Tenable Network Security, the company Renaud Deraison co-founded, changed Nessus 3 to a proprietary (closed source) license. The earlier versions appear to have been removed from the official website since then. The Nessus 3 engine is still free of charge, though Tenable charges $100/month per scanner for the ability to perform configuration audits for PCI, CIS, FDCC and other configuration standards, technical support, SCADA vulnerability audits, the latest network checks and patch audits, the ability to audit anti-virus configurations and the ability for Nessus to perform sensitive data searches to look for credit card, social security number and many other types of corporate data.
In July of 2008, Tenable sent out a revision of the feed license which will allow home users full access to plugin feeds. A professional license is available for commercial use.
The Nessus 2 engine and a minority of the plugins are still GPL, leading to forked open source projects based on Nessus like OpenVAS and Porz-Wahn. Tenable Network Security has still maintained the Nessus 2 engine and has updated it several times since the release of Nessus 3.
Nessus 3 is available for many different Unix-like and Windows systems, offers patch auditing of UNIX and Windows hosts without the need for an agent and is 2-5 times faster than Nessus 2.
On April 9, 2009, Tenable released Nessus 4.0.0. On February 15, 2012, Tenable released Nessus 5.0.
Read more about this topic: Nessus (software)
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