Recently Viewed Topics
Example: Host Discovery
Knowing what hosts are on your network is the first step to any vulnerability assessment. Launch a host discovery scan to see what hosts are on your network. After you have a list of hosts, you can choose what hosts you want to target in a specific vulnerability scan.
Hosts discovered by a host discovery scan do not count towards your license limit, if applicable. For more information, see License Utilization.
The following overview describes a typical workflow of creating and launching a host discovery scan, then creating a follow-up scan that target discovered hosts that you choose.
Create and launch a host discovery scan:
-
In the top navigation bar, click Scans.
The My Scans page appears.
-
In the upper right corner, click the New Scan button.
The Scan Templates page appears.
- Under Discovery, click the Host Discovery template.
- Configure the host discovery scan:
- For Name, enter a name for the scan.
For Targets, enter targets as hostnames, IPv4 addresses, or IPv6 addresses.
Tip: For IP addresses, you can use CIDR notation (e.g., 192.168.0.0/24), a range (e.g., 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.255), or a comma-separated list (e.g., 192.168.0.0,192.168.0.1). For more information, see Scan Targets.
- (Optional) Configure the remaining settings.
-
To launch the scan immediately, click the
button, and then click Launch.Nessus runs the host discovery scan, and the My Scans page appears.
-
In the scans table, click the row of a completed host discovery scan.
The scan's results page appears.
- In the Hosts tab, view the hosts that Nessus discovered.
What to do next
- Create a scan that targets hosts that Nessus discovered in your host discovery scan.