Nessus scanner code forked

2005-10-13 04:01

http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/nessus-scanner-code-forked/2005/10/11/1128796513799.html By Sam Varghese October 11, 2005 A group of British security researchers has decided to start a fork of the popular Nessus vulnerability scanner, following a decision by the owner of Nessus to change the licence under which the scanner was released. Nessus was released under the General Public License (GPL) which means its code was freely available. The change of licensing terms was announced last week by Renaud Deraison, who began the Nessus Project in 1998. Four years later, Deraison co-founded a company named Tenable Network Security which now develops Nessus. Last week, Deraison said [1] the forthcoming version of Nessus, version 3.0, would be available free, but not under the GPL. He said the current version, Nessus 2.0, would continue to be maintained under the GPL with bug fixes. The British team is headed by Tim Brown who, in a posting [2] to the Full-Disclosure vulnerability mailing list, said the fork would be called GNessUs. "As a result of recent announcements by Tenable, we believe a fork of Nessus is required to allow future free development of this tool," he wrote. Brown said the decision had been taken after consulting colleagues from within the security industry. "While we would like to believe that we will be able to continue to take updates of the Nessus 2 source code from the Nessus website, we will be endeavouring to add fresh functionality and plugins as part of the GNessUs project," he wrote. "The fork will be based on the current nessus 2.2.5 packages from GNU/Debian (sic), the source of which can be found above in a slightly modified form. We would welcome contact from any interested developers." [1] http://mail.nessus.org/pipermail/nessus/2005-October/msg00035.html [2] http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/full-disclosure/2005-October/037863.html _________________________________________ InfoSec News v2.0 - Coming Soon! http://www.infosecnews.org

News URL

http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/nessus-scanner-code-forked/2005/10/11/1128796513799.html