Nessus Expert -

If they say, “Oh yeah, Plugin 12345 flagged a kernel vulnerability that was actually backported by Red Hat, so I had to write a custom suppression filter,” — hire them.

Nessus is just a tool. But in the hands of an expert, it’s not a vulnerability scanner. It’s a . nessus expert

If they say, “Nessus is never wrong,” run away. If they say, “Oh yeah, Plugin 12345 flagged

A novice logs it. An intermediate user verifies it. An asks: “Why did this plugin fire? What’s the difference between Plugin 153953 and Plugin 155321? Which one is a false positive?” It’s a

Now go update your plugins and stop running scans as DOMAIN\Administrator . Your production environment will thank you. What’s your biggest pet peeve about vulnerability scanning? Let me know in the comments (or on the company Slack, where we ignore Nessus alerts until patch Tuesday).

If you scroll through LinkedIn, you’ll see plenty of people list “Nessus” under their skills. But here’s the dirty secret of the industry: Running a scan does not make you an expert.