Introduction to the Nessus Scan, Policy and Report Format

The Nessus Client 3.0 introduced a new format for Nessus scan policies, targets and results. This is known as the ".nessus" format. This blog entry discusses the advantages of this new file type and includes links to recently published technical documentation about the format and layout of the file.

Historically, Nessus daemons and clients supported various file formats for scan configurations as well as scan results. When Tenable designed the new file format, we wanted to unify these into one file. This allows for rapid and accurate reproduction of a previous scan as well as understanding what a scan was looking for to begin with.

For example, if you only enabled FTP checks and performed a scan, you should expect to get information about FTP security issues and not SSH or Internet Explorer issues. You also shouldn't conclude that there aren't any SSH or Internet Explorer issues because your FTP scan didn't find any, but this is exactly what a variety of NAC and SIM vendors do. We're hoping that the unified .nessus format will make working with the scan results easier.