Free Vulnerability Scan for your PC

Some weeks ago I tried a product on my home laptop I had not used before – Nessus. Obviously this is a well known product and it is something I have seen in use at work to great effect. However, there is a free version available from Tenable (available here) that can be downloaded for a range of operating systems for home use. I liked it because it was simple to install and use and the scan only took a few minutes. I had not done this before on the Mac I have so the results were interesting. 

It produces a range of vulnerabilities rated from critical to high, medium or low and it provides understandable information (in most cases) for each of these. At the very least by going through the exercise you’ll certainly learn something. I picked up some simple insight into software I shouldn't have had installed, that I didn’t use and that was just increasing the attack surface of my laptop. If course there were also some vulnerabilities introduced by Nessus itself which I thought was funny so it's important to ensure you uninstall it afterwards.

You can use this product as often as you like so it’s probably a good idea to run it on at least a monthly basis, particularly given it only takes a few minutes. 

If you get a chance and you run it on a Windows system, I’d love to hear about the results you get, particularly if you have fully up-to-date patching and AV in place – and whether you found it easy to follow the output.