Nessus Professional Database Export

A script to export Nessus results regularly into a MySQL database for easy analysis/aggregation.

Use Cases

• Find occurences of a specific vulnerability across your scans (e.g. in a folder) without having to export all of them to CSV.
• Search for text in plugin outputs across all your scans.
• Quickly see trending stats across scan runs (summary stats are calculated at export time and saved in the DB).
• Build a web app front end to present a subset of results for customers.

Some usage examples here: https://projectblack.io/blog/nessus-reporting-customisation-and-analysis/

Prerequisites

• Nessus Professional
• MySQL database (can be run locally or in Docker)

Installation

Database Setup

More details can be found in database\README.md.

Option 1: Docker (Recommended)

1. Start the database container:

   docker compose up -d

Default passwords can be changed in the docker-compose.yml file.

Option 2: Manual Setup

1. Install MySQL on your system
2. Create a new database and user
3. Import the schema:

   mysql -u your_username -p your_database < database/schema.sql

4. You also have to import the stored procedures in database/queries/*

Exporter Setup

More details can be found in exporter\README.md.

Configuration

1. Copy config.ini.example to config.ini:

   cp config.ini.example config.ini

2. Configure the following in config.ini:

   • Nessus hostname, port, access key, and secret key
   • MySQL hostname, username, password, and database name
   • Additional options:
     • trash: Set to true to include scans in trash folders
     • debug: Set to true for debug output
     • compliance: Set to true to include compliance data

Option 1: Docker

1. Build the exporter container:

   cd exporter
   docker build -t nessus-export .

2. Run the exporter:

   docker run nessus-export

Option 2: Manual Setup

1. Install Python dependencies:

   pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Usage

The exporter can be run in two ways:

Docker

docker run nessus-export

Manual

python3 export.py

Example output:

Processing: REDACTED
Inserting scan run: 69
Inserting scan run: 81
Processing: REDACTED
Processing: REDACTED
Inserting scan run: 87

Once the export is completed you can run whatever queries you want. e.g.:

TODO and NOTES

• TODO: Add flag to only retrieve latest scan
• TODO: Possibly build more samples if there's interest?
• NOTE: Compliance scans are experimental, try it and let me know if it works?