Tenable’s Nessus vulnerability scanner is a very popular security scanning tool. While Nessus does have its own built-in reporting capability, it doesn’t always meet all the needs of its users.

That’s why we’ve just release a new solution, NessViewer. This application takes the .nessus files generated from the scans and gives users the ability to do additional analysis and report generation.

NessViewer is a .NET Application that executes in .NET Framework, preventing the need for installation or creating any footprint on your computer.

NessViewer provides the following views into your data:

Dashboard, with information about each of the scans loaded from .nessus files as well as asset totals
Vulnerabilities, with a data view that can be sorted, filtered and grouped
Software, providing the ability to create software lists for scanned assets
Ports, giving you a list of ports by asset as well as the ability to look up possible related listeners
Detailed Vulnerability list or DVL, a commonly requested format for validation events
Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M)

Every view in NessViewer is also exportable to Microsoft Excel.

Getting started

To get started, download and open the NessViewer EXE. There’s no installation, as long as you have .NET Framework 4.6 or higher, the application will start immediately.

The first thing you will see is the Open Files tab, you’ll click the “Open Files” button to open one or more Nessus files. You can come back to this tab at any time and use “Open Files” to add more .nessus files. Clicking the “Remove” button next to any file will remove it.

After you’ve loaded some files, it’s time to start looking at your data. You’ll notice on the left hand side that there are several tabs marked with icons. The first one under the Open Files tab is the Dashboard view.

Dashboard