Be sure to scroll down and view the whole post as there is both audio and video coverage of today’s episode!

Intro

I’m going to show you some easy/cheap things you can do implement monitoring and alerting in your home or corporate network. Today we’ll focus on installing and configuring Nessus (a tool that can serve as both a port scanner and a vuln-finder) and install it in a home network (the corp version ya gotta pay for, folks).

Get Nessus and install it – TLDR version

Head here to get the process going. You’ll just need to fill out a few bits of information in the registration form, and then you can download the package that applies to your operating system. For me, I’m running a 64-bit Ubuntu VM, so I just grabbed the package and then:

Uploaded to your server using scp:

scp ~/Downloads/name-of-nessus-install.deb brian@ip.of.nessus.server:/tmp

Then install with:

sudo dpkg -i name-of-nessus-package.deb

Once the install is complete, start Nessus with:

/etc/init.d/nessusd start

Now you should be able to hit https://ip.of.your.nessus-server:8834 and follow the wizard to finish the Nessus install and begin configuring your scans (details in the video below).

Video:

Here’s the complementary video content for today’s audio podcast: