Nessus is a vulnerability scanning program. Its goal is to detect potential vulnerabilities on the tested systems.
Nessus works by performing a port scan with one of its four internal portscanners (or it can optionally use Amap or Nmap) to determine which ports are open on the target and then tries various exploits on the open ports. The vulnerability tests, available as subscriptions, are written in NASL (Nessus Attack Scripting Language), a scripting language optimized for custom network interaction.
