Nessus Agent 8.2.3 Release Notes - 2021-03-18

This release is end-of-life (EOL). Upgrade to a supported version. For information about EOL dates and policies for Tenable products, see the Tenable Software Release Lifecycle Matrix and Policy.

New Features

The following are the new features included in Agent 8.2.3:

  • Hardware Support Updates - In our ongoing efforts to support more hardware platforms, we have extended Nessus Agent support for the following:

    • Apple M1 Processor

  • Support for AWS EC2 IMDSv2 - Agents leveraged in AWS EC2 now support Instance Metadata Service version 2 (IMDSv2) for metadata collection where available. For EC2 instances that do not have IMDSv2 enabled, IMDSv1 will still be used for metadata collection.

For more information about the features and functionality supported in this release, see the Tenable Nessus Agent 8.2.x User Guide.

Bug Fixes

Note: This release includes a fix for a potential vulnerability. For more information, see the Tenable Product Security Advisory.

Bug Fix Defect ID
Resolved an issue where Agent service would be marked as an executable in some Linux installs. 01132263
Resolved an issue where Agents were sometimes showing an incorrect status when unable to authenticate to Nessus Manager. 01155311

Upgrade Notes

  • Users upgrading agents via Nessus Manager will not upgrade to 8.2.0 and later unless Nessus Manager is already updated to 8.12.0 or higher.

  • New Tenable.io Domain - As a part of continuous security and scalability improvements to Tenable infrastructure, we have added a new sensor.cloud.tenable.com domain that Tenable.io-linked agents communicate with.

    • Starting with Agent 8.1.0, Tenable.io-linked agents communicate with Tenable.io using sensor.cloud.tenable.com. In case agents are not able to connect to the new domain, they fall back to using cloud.tenable.com. Agents with earlier versions will continue to use the cloud.tenable.com domain.

    • Recommended Action: If you use domain allow lists for firewalls, Tenable recommends adding *.cloud.tenable.com (with the wildcard character) to the allow list. This ensures communication with sensor.cloud.tenable.com and all future subdomains, reducing operational overhead. Please contact your network administrator for assistance with making necessary changes to your allow list..
  • You can upgrade to the latest version of Nessus Agent from any previously supported version.
  • If your upgrade path skips versions of Nessus Agent, Tenable recommends reviewing the release notes for all skipped versions. You may need to update your configurations because of features and functionality added in skipped versions.

  • Tenable.io-linked Agents now support the ability to choose your Agent update plan:

    • By default, the Agent update plan is set to update to the generally available (GA) version.

    • If you want to manually update your Agents to the newest version when it is made available for Early Access (EA), first disable automatic updates so the agent does not automatically downgrade to the previous version (GA).

    • If you want your Agent to automatically update to the newest version, set your Agent update plan to ea.

  • Nessus Agents 7.7.0 and later support the capability to downgrade from a later version:

    • Tenable.io-linked Nessus Agents support automatically downgrading via the Agent update plan setting. To automatically revert a Tenable.io-linked Nessus Agent to the previous version, set your Agent update plan to stable. Your agent will always remain on an earlier version than the latest GA version until you change your update plan.

    • To manually downgrade a Nessus Agent to a previous version (7.7.0 or greater), first disable automatic updates, then obtain the Agent package from Tenable Support and install it over your current version.