Using Nessus and Metasploit Together
by Paul Asadoorian on August 8, 2011
Security Tools Working Together
This is the third in a series of posts that describe the use of Nessus on BackTrack 5. Previous posts covered how to activate Nessus on BackTrack 5 and how to integrate Nmap, Hydra, and Nikto with Nessus. In this post we will cover initiating Nessus scans from within Metasploit. Beginning with Nessus 4, Tenable introduced the Nessus API, which lets users programmatically interface with a Nessus server using XMLRPC. Zate Berg took the initiative to write modules in Metasploit that, among other things, can launch a Nessus scan and import the results into the Metasploit database. From there, we can find which hosts are vulnerable to exploitation, exploit them, harvest the password hashes, and then use those password hashes to initiate credentialed Nessus scans.
Configuring Nessus
The first step needed to use Nessus with Metasploit is to log into Nessus and create a user for Metasploit. In this example, I created a user called "msf" with a password of "metasploit".
