Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
The ONLY Book to Read if You Run Nessus Across the Enterprise

Ever since its beginnings in early 1998, the Nessus Project has attracted security researchers from all walks of life. It continues this growth today. It has been adopted as a de facto standard by the security industry, vendor, and practitioner alike, many of whom rely on Nessus as the foundation to their security practices. Now, Nessus project founder Renaud Deraison and a team of leading developers have created the definitive book for the Nessus community.

* Perform a Vulnerability Assessment

Use Nessus to find programming errors that allow intruders to gain unauthorized access.

* Obtain and Install Nessus

Install from source or binary, set up up clients and user accounts, and update your plug-ins.

* Modify the Preferences Tab

Specify the options for Nmap and other complex, configurable components of Nessus.

* Understand Scanner Logic and Determine Actual Risk

Plan your scanning strategy and learn what variables can be changed.

* Prioritize Vulnerabilities

Prioritize and manage critical vulnerabilities, information leaks, and denial of service errors.

* Deal with False Positives

Learn the different types of false positives and the differences between intrusive and nonintrusive tests.

* Get Under the Hood of Nessus

Understand the architecture and design of Nessus and master the Nessus Attack Scripting Language (NASL).

* Scan the Entire Enterprise Network

Plan for enterprise deployment by gauging network bandwith and topology issues.

Your Solutions Membership Gives You Access to:

Comprehensive FAQ page that consolidates all of the key points of this book into an easy to search web page

Rating : - Getting Old and Lacking Real Meat
First, it's old. Even if you're using the open source 2.x versions and not the commerical 3.x versions, you'll find the content to be a bit dated. Not a problem for the most part, as this book talks a lot about vuln scanning concepts and all that is still applicable. And the differences in GUI layout between the book and latest versions isn't hard to rectify just by clicking around a little. The age of the text is more of a problem in that it lacks discussions of current attacks.

Second, a lot of the book just covers basics about vuln scans and using nessus. Sorry, but for the money I paid for this book, I'm not seeing the value that other reviewers are referring to. IMHO lots of this basic usage and intro stuff is covered in numerous online articles (some of which are linked from Tenable's website on the Nessus documentation page). Even topics like dealing with false-positives are covered pretty well in those resources.

Granted, the reviews are generally from 2004 and 2005, and many of the articles I'm referring to were written after then. So maybe this book was really helpful at that time - but for anyone considering buying this book circa 2008 or later, save your money. Either wait for an updated edition or look at free resources online.

As for the "lack of meat", this book just doesn't go deep enough. Again, I'm not getting much insight beyond what I already found online. I've gleaned some good tips, but again, not enough to justify the length (and cost) of this book.