Nessus, no available hosts

Hi,

I have problem with a lab Nessus. When I want to scan a specify target, the scan can’t find any hosts, so the scan find 0 vulnerability and in the hosts column, there is info that no host are available. I tried to restart the lab, Nessus and cleaned the web browser history, but nothing helped. Any recomandation what I can do with it?

You’re gonna wanna provide some more details. Hosts, policies, policy configs, etc.
If you could provide some more screenshots, that would be helpful for anyone coming here to help :wink:

Thank for your reply. I just follow a steps of course the video of Nessus on ine website. But in my case it didn’t work. I just installed the Nessus, started the Nessus service and client, then Iog in to the Nessus client, set up the scan the same way like in the video, but it didn’t work. So I thought that somebody will se the basic description and the screenshoot and will already know where is the problem.

I will try to find manual from Nessus and learn more about that. :slight_smile:

No one can really tell what’s going on with this screenshot save for the fact that it didn’t find anything. You can’t see hosts, you can’t see what the scan policy’s like, you can’t see any information that can help troubleshoot.
What you can do, however, is troubleshoot with Wireshark. Also make sure that plugins are up to date, etc.

I didn’t mean it bad. I thought what I thought because my lack of knowledge, therefore I will learn more about it and not waste your time.

Hey, welcome to the forum.

You’re going to need to tell it what hosts to scan.

Hi,

I scanned this host 192.168.99.50. This is the alive host on 192.168.99.0/24. Which is the network of Nessus lab ( Penetration Testing Basics course). I put the target host to the column of the scan but after I clicked save the scan didn’t launch automaticialy, I had click on the launch button, then it started an imidiettaly finished with no results.

Nessus - YouTube

Can you please make sure to enable the ‘Windows’ plugin? Granted, the scan time will be considerably longer because it currently has 4000+ vulns to sift through, but you should see some results.
Also, can you verify that the host is up?

By default, Nessus uses ping/icmp to detect the live hosts in the network. If the target machine’s firewall is on, or something is blocking the icmp packets, then nessus won’t be able to detect the live hosts. However, there are other options in the scan configuration to use tcp/udp to detect live hosts in the network. You can explore that and try to run the scan.

Edit: If you are running kali(scanning machine) on a VM and the host machine has some endpoint security/antivirus enabled, might interfere with the scanning. Check that as well.

I would recommend starting off with the host discovery profile, this will discover all active hosts on the network, after which, you can begin scanning for vulnerabilities.