Summary

The Windows Compliance Check plugin is implementing an updated library to run commands on Windows targets. The enhancements will include the following benefits.

• The plugin will improve on its handling of command timeouts. There were issues when long running commands would timeout on the scanner but leave temporary files on the target. This update will force long running checks to close when timing out and remove temporary files.
• The recently released improved resource management controls for Windows plugins on agents will now be extended to running audits.

Potential Impacts:

Tenable has gone to great lengths to ensure that the content that it publishes will operate and produce the same results that it always has. Customized audits may exhibit some changes due to the introduced job control of the command execution. These changes tend to be compliance checks that generate different results (failure instead of passing), or the actual values of the check have different text that would affect baseline scans.

If custom content does exhibit these issues, strategies to work with the new library can be found in Compliance WMI Library Enhancement.

Tenable Plugins

• 21156 - Windows Compliance Checks

Target Release Date

February 9, 2026