Recently, I was trying to use my previously automated Nessus Automation scripts and detected they aren’t working on latest Nessus 5.2 XMLRPC.Last time, I automated network scanning tasks using XMLRPC in Perl but strange it did not work anymore with Nessus 5.2.

Here’s the error message I got while running my old scripts:

Cannot login to :https://localhost:8834/

I tried to resolve this error, read latest XMLRPC documentation but could not made it working. I then used XMLRPC in Python and this did not worked either. Strange!!!

Next and last attempt was to use XMLRPC in Ruby and this worked for me..:) To make this working, you need to have nessus-xmlrpc gem installed within your ruby installation (obviously). Refer here for complete installation of Ruby and gem on Mac.

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#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'nessus-xmlrpc'

ARGV.each do|a|

a = ARGV[1]

n=NessusXMLRPC::NessusXMLRPC.new('','username','password');

if n.logged_in

id,name = n.policy_get_first

puts "using policy ID: " + id + " with name: " + name

uid=n.scan_new(id,"#{ARGV[0]}","#{ARGV[0]}")

puts "scanning for: " + "#{ARGV[0]}"

puts "report will be saved as " + "#{a}_report.xml"

puts "status: " + n.scan_status(uid)

while not n.scan_finished(uid)

sleep 10

end

content=n.report_file_download(uid)

File.open("#{a}_report.xml", 'w') {|f| f.write(content) }

end

Above script takes two user input from standard STDIN i.e. IP Address and Report Name using a shell script. Here’s is my shell script that I use to run Nessus against a single IP:

#! /bin/sh

echo "Enter the IP address to scan:"

read ipaddr

echo "Enter the report name:"

read filename

echo "Nessus running for $ipaddr"

ruby nessus.rb $ipaddr $filename

echo "Completed scans for IP: $ipaddr"

echo "Output saved starting with $filename"

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Just copy above scripts and place them in same folder and you are ready to go from terminal. Here’s a sample output for your reference: