INFORMATION

In a Nessus or Tenable Vulnerability Management scan policy, under Discovery > Port Scanning, you can define the port scan range. This field can be set to an explicit value, range, combination of both, or default. When set using the keyword 'default', the scanner will scan approximately 4,790 common ports. The list of ports can be found in the nessus-services file on the Nessus scanner. This list can change over time.

Note: 'default' is case sensitive and must be lowercase.

DETAILS

The nessus-services file can be found in these default locations on a Nessus scanner:

Windows

C:\ProgramData\Tenable\Nessus\nessus\nessus-services

Mac

/Library/Nessus/run/var/nessus/nessus-services

Linux

/opt/nessus/var/nessus/nessus-services 

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

An example of the nessus-services file is attached to this article. Please note that the contents of this file are subject to change.

Previously, when creating a new scan or policy using the Internal PCI Network Scan template, by default the port scan range was set to 'common'. This is not the same as the 'default' list mentioned above. However, the Internal PCI Network Scan template now uses the default range.