Actually Nessus subscribed to the Direct Feed can perform a lot of your
PCI auditing needs beyond vulnerability scanning including configuration
auditing and patch auditing. It can also scan systems for the presence
of credit card and personal customer data which is important to many of
the requirements of PCI as well.

As far as PCI is concerned, organizations need to consider a lot more
than just vulnerabilites which is why we've positioned Tenable's
products to look at firewall logs, access logs and network traffic to
produce data that is relevant to all 12 sections of the PCI standard.

And although I think web application auditing for custom applications is
a good thing, section 6.6 of PCI 1.1 says organizations need to either
use an application firewall, or ensure their systems have been
accurately scanned with an application scanner.

I agree that using an application scanner with Nessus will give more
results, but to say that Nessus has false positives and that application
scanners don't isn't accurate. I would invite you to read a recent
review of web application scanners by Larry Suto where many of the
products you mentioned didn't do that well.

http://www.cgisecurity.com/2007/10/12

Ron Gula
Tenable Network Security



sanjeev sinha wrote:
> Nessus may be good for network vulnerability scanning (even then it is not 
> sufficient as you may have to eliminate false positives).  However, PCI also 
> states that any  web apps using credit cards need to go through that test as 
> well.  You may be better off using an app tester (like watchfire's app scan 
> which is expensive but great or webinspect which is good but reporting 
> mechanism sucks or paros which is free but not great for huge apps but good 
> for crawling a site and manually testing your results).  Bottomline: 
> integrate the two and you will get better results.  Scanning a network 
> without scanning an app that uses credit cards or other private information 
> will only cause issues.  Keep in mind certain changes to PCI DSS implemented 
> recently.
> 
> Sanjeev
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Larry Petty" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[email protected]>
> Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 1:49 PM
> Subject: Using Nessus for PCI
> 
> 
>> We are getting ready to take the test to become an ASV for PCI scanning. 
>> We use nessus and retina for our vulnerability scans. We rely on nessus 
>> because retina does not work as well on external scans. I'm also 
>> purchasing the direct feed subscription this week.
>>
>> Are there any ASV's on this list? Does anyone know if the nessus 
>> vulnerability risk level is sufficient for PCI reports?
>>
>> Are there any tips for our up coming test that you can give me?
>>
>>
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