Now it's important to know that inside of NESSIS there are many different types
of configurations that we can use to perform detailed scans.
The more detailed the scan is for vulnerabilities on a target system, the more
likelihood there is for us to be able to find something to exploit when we're
conducting our
pentast across the different systems and networks. So we're going to go through
this skill and take a little bit of a deeper look inside of NESSIS for some of
those detailed configurations.
That being said, I just added the configuring NESSIS lab inside of the actual
course overall. So if you take a look at the skills listed for the actual
course itself, you'll be able to see it listed inside of there.
What does that mean for all of us inside of this skill and moving forward? Well
, I don't want to rehash or reinvent the wheel with NESSIS labs continuing
throughout this course.
So we'll use that playground lab for the course overall to be able to work in
skills like this one here.
And as we continue throughout this skill, we're going to be referencing that
lab because at that point inside of the previous skills final lab,
we already have NESSIS set up. The only thing you'll have to do is to be able
to validate your own trial license whenever this skill becomes available to you
.
Now, what I have here on the screen is a list of different scans that we have
available to us inside of NESSIS right below the options of the basic host
discovery and ping only discovery scans.
Those are discovery scans only and don't really give us any information
pertaining to the vulnerabilities of an individual system.
And this was apparent to us in the last skill when we did our host discovery
scan and we only came back with like one medium and a couple of loads and a lot
of information about that particular system.
And to be fair, we could have done all of that using N-Map and do it a slow
discovery scan inside of there.
Where NESSIS becomes really handy is the ability to actively scan, as we
mentioned in the last skill,
for different vulnerabilities on a particular system. Now, we could start by
looking at top left with a basic network scan.
And this is basically a full system scan that doesn't really take into account
the type of host that it's scanning.
So it's kind of a shotgun blast approach, if you will.
And we can go through and try to do things like a predictable scan, but a lot
of these are just basically built out predetermined as kind of basic options
for us to use inside of NESSIS.
At this point, I would definitely encourage you to be able to go through and
check a lot of these and try them on your own.
And you'll be restricted to the IP address limitations of a trial license
unless you buy this yourself and use it in all.
And what we're going to be taking a look at more in depth in sign of this
particular skill is the advanced scan.
And we'll be popping over to that in just a moment.
But the advanced scan is one of the most powerful ones on here because we can
actually go through and make different types of configuration changes
and address some of the detailed plugins that we would be targeting on a
particular system.
Before we come back to that, just take a moment to look through and see the
different types of scans and their definitions to understand that while these
are the basics that are already here built out for us, we can build our own
scans and we'll be getting into that as we configure a more in depth advanced
scan.
But I also wanted to point out something real quick too.
And this is something we may get into in a later time in a different course and
that is on the top right where it says NESSIS 10.8.0/10.8.1 agent reset.
Scan to find reset and update NESSIS agents.
This is because NESSIS, as we are using it right now, is just a simple
standalone vulnerability scanner.
But there are agents that we can put throughout the network. Basically, think
of it like this.
NESSIS scanner main, which is what we're using right here, we can have
different bee lands across our organization and a NESSIS agent within each of
those different bee lands.
And instead of using one NESSIS scanner to scan everything within an entire
organization,
those NESSIS agents can do it for us on their individual segments and send all
the results back to us at our main NESSIS
vulnerability assessment workstation.
And for this particular exercise, we're pretending that that's what we're
working on right now,
except we don't have any agents available to us out there on the network.
We're just using this one scanner for everything.
So with all that being said, let's go ahead and hop into the next portion of
the skill where we start to understand what our plug-ins.