From:	 Renaud Deraison <deraison@nessus.org>
To:	 sectools@securityfocus.com
Subject: Nessus 1.2.0 released
Date:	 Thu, 18 Apr 2002 19:03:19 +0200



The Nessus Team is pleased to announce the availability of Nessus 1.2.0

Nessus is a remote security scanner which has been developped since 1998. 
It is free, open-sourced (GPLed) and updated very regularly (and currently
performs over 900 security checks)


What is new in Nessus 1.2, in comparison of Nessus 1.0 ?
--------------------------------------------------------

A lot of changes took place during the two years Nessus 1.2 has been worked
on. Here's a non-exhaustive list :

- Security checks are run in parallel ;
- Full SSL support ;
- "safe checks" option (makes nessusd rely on a banner rather than take
  the risk to disable the remote service) ;
- "optimisations" option (make nessusd run "focused" tests (ie: IIS-specific
  tests on IIS, and so on...)
- Better CGI auditing ;
- IDS evasion options ;
- KB saving support (can be used for off-line security audits) ;
- Session saving support ;
- Differential scans ;
- New reports file formats ;
- Tuned security checks (for better performance) ;
- More configurable ;
- Improved SMB support (Nessus can log into a domain, and extracts more
  information from the tested hosts).
- Scales __much__ better ;
- Kazillions of bugs fixed ;
- And more !

Note that Nessus 1.2.x is the result of two years of work and
improvements, so not everything can be listed. Have a look at the changelogs
for full details (in nessus-core/CHANGES)


Where to get it
---------------

Nessus is available at :

		http://www.nessus.org/

and

		ftp://ftp.nessus.org/pub/nessus/nessus-1.2.0/



Portability
-----------


Nessus 1.2.0 can be compiled on a wide range of Unixes, including :

	- Solaris
	- OpenBSD
	- FreeBSD
	- NetBSD
	- Red Hat Linux (and probably other distros)
	- Darwin / MacOS X
	- ...


A Win32 client (NessusWX) is available for the Win32 platform
(at http://nessuswx.nessus.org)



More toys soon
--------------

A web interface allowing you to mount your own ASP business will be released
soon - keep an eye on our website for details about this :)


Bugs ? What bugs ??
-------------------

If you find bugs or have enhancement requests, please send them to me
(deraison@nessus.org)


Thanks
------

I'd like to thank everyone who tested and improved Nessus when it was labelled
as being unstable.

I would like to thank in particular Michel Arboi (arboi@noos.fr) and 
Michael Scheidell (scheidell@fdma.com) who both did an insanely big 
amount of work for Nessus 1.2




Thanks,

				-- Renaud

-- 
Renaud Deraison
The Nessus Project
http://www.nessus.org