Tenable Network Security Releases Nessus 3.0 Vulnerability Scanner; Enterprises, Government Agencies, and Consultants to Benefit from Improved Performance and Commercial Support Options

COLUMBIA, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 12, 2005--Tenable Network Security, Inc., a leading developer of security management solutions and creator of the popular and award-winning Nessus vulnerability scanner, today announced the general availability of Nessus 3.0 for the Linux and FreeBSD platforms. Nessus 3.0 was developed in response to growing market demand from enterprises, government agencies and consultants for a commercially licensed version of Nessus. Nessus 3.0 users will now have access to a number of commercial support and training options from Tenable Network Security. Tenable Network Security will continue to manage, distribute and maintain the open source version, Nessus 2.x.

Nessus 3.0 benefits include:

“Nessus 3.0 is a more robust version of the vulnerability scanner with better handling of concurrent host scanning. Its scan engine is faster than previous versions, achieving up to five times improvement when scanning Windows networks”

-- Vastly increased performance

-- Access to over 9,000+ quality vulnerability checks with vulnerability update subscription options from Tenable Network Security

-- Support for CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System)

-- Ability to audit Windows, Unix, Linux hosts and more

"Nessus 3.0 is a more robust version of the vulnerability scanner with better handling of concurrent host scanning. Its scan engine is faster than previous versions, achieving up to five times improvement when scanning Windows networks," said Renaud Deraison, Chief Research Officer, Tenable Network Security, co-founder and the primary author of the Nessus vulnerability scanner.

In addition to gaining dramatic improvements in performance, Tenable also provides an optional Direct Feed subscription service for Nessus 3.0 which provides immediate access to new vulnerability checks and entitles Nessus 3.0 users to commercial support from Tenable. The Tenable Plugins include support for a rating methodology called Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) that can be used to express the criticality of a discovered vulnerability or threat.

For corporations and government agencies that want to leverage and extend Nessus, Tenable produces highly optimized, turn-key enterprise vulnerability and security event management solutions. Tenable's enterprise vulnerability management product, the Lightning Console, adds powerful scan scheduling, asset tagging, remediation tracking and reporting as well as vulnerability correlation with intrusion detection events, to improve incident response prioritization.

"Tight integration with the Nessus scanner is one of the main advantages of this product (Lightning Console), providing customers the ability to really put context around the vulnerability scan. The Tenable product is at the lower price range when compared to other vendors and their strong reputation in vulnerability assessment gives Tenable a definite edge in this market," said Robert Ayoub, Network Security Analyst, for Frost & Sullivan.

Information and Availability

Nessus 3.0 is immediately available for download from Tenable at http://www.nessus.org/download. For more information on Tenable's enterprise vulnerability management products to extend and enhance the value of your Nessus implementations, please visit: http://www.tenablesecurity.com/products/index.shtml

About Tenable Network Security

Tenable Network Security develops enterprise security solutions that provide vulnerability management and security event management for Global 2000 organizations for effective network security management. Tenable is uniquely positioned to detect vulnerabilities with active and passive scanning and analysis, and host-based patch monitoring for enterprise networks. Key product lines include: Nessus, the leading global technology utilized for vulnerability scanning; NeVO, for passive vulnerability monitoring; Lightning Console, for enterprise security management; and, Thunder, for secure log aggregation and analysis. For more information, please visit us at www.tenablesecurity.com.

Tenable Network Security(R) is a registered trademark and Nessus is a trademark of Tenable Network Security, Inc.