You have probably thought of this already, but if port scans are crashing the applications there are already some big issues there that need to be resolved. We all want to be cautious in a production environment, but if a port scan cause a DoS by way of killing the app -- something is wrong. You've already identified a problem that an attacker could exploit..on accident or on purpose.
Like the previous reply said though, if you choose the treat unscanned ports as closed option it will not check as many. I believe it still does some ports from my testing. I sent in an e-mail about this some time ago related to experiences with the Nessus-WX client, which doesn't have this option. For this client, even setting the option in the conf file, it will still do connect to unscanned ports. Steven securityzone.org Steven > > > I have a question regarding port scan and plugins. If I disable port > scanning all together, do all of the plugins still run as expected. I > do a regular scan of a bunch of servers, different OS', and have found > that port scanning is crashing the applications on the servers. I am > wondering if I disable port scanning and just run the tests, if the test > will run. I would expect that they would, the only effect being that > the "optimize tests" do not work because Nessus will known nothing of > the device it is scanning. > > > > Thanks, > > > Pete > > _______________________________________________ > Nessus mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.nessus.org/mailman/listinfo/nessus _______________________________________________ Nessus mailing list [email protected] http://mail.nessus.org/mailman/listinfo/nessus
