Good afternoon. I was requested to try and import .nessus reports into greenbone. I tried to do that but I received different errors (i.e : “A REPORT element is required”). First, is it even possible to import .nessus reports directly? I was told this might have been possible in previous versions. if not, are there alternative methods to do that?
Second, where can I find previous releases/ older versions of greenbone for download?
Any help would be appreciated, thank you.
When I add a Tag, the above error goes away but gets replaced by the following : An internal error occurred while creating a new report. It is unclear whether the report has been created or not. Diagnostics: Failure to receive response from manager daemon.
Hello ych, and welcome to the Greenbone community!
These errors indicate that the uploaded file was not a valid/supported report file.
I don’t think this was ever possible. According to the official Tenable sources at https://www.tenable.com/blog/introduction-to-the-nessus-scan-policy-and-report-format and https://static.tenable.com/documentation/nessus_v2_file_format.pdf, the .nessus format was first introduced in 2008 and then underwent major changes in 2016. OpenVAS/GNessUs split from Nessus in 2005 already, with Nessus changing to a proprietary, closed source license, so we had no way of incorporating any upstream changes from there.
Maybe your sources were referring to the even older .nbe report format type, which may have been importable somewhere around 2005, but this is no longer possible today. I found an internal feature request from 2011 where this was requested (meaning it was no longer possible back then), but such a change was never implemented.
The only way to import such reports into the current version of Greenbone would be to write your own converter from .nessus to Greenbone .xml (see our TechDoc Portal section “6.15 Element report”). Even then, note that internal Nessus data structures, such as the plugin IDs, are no longer consistent with ours, so some data may get lost in the conversion process.
You can check out the “oldstable” or “oldoldstable” branches from our GitHub at https://github.com/greenbone and build from source. There may be installation instructions for these old versions available if you search the community, but please be aware that they are end-of-life and that we cannot provide any assistance for them anymore.
We recommend using the currently supported 22.4 version, either built from source or via Docker:
Thank you, appreciate the response!