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Tenable.io collector

Overview

Managed in the cloud and powered by Nessus technology, Tenable.io provides the industry's most comprehensive vulnerability coverage with the ability to predict which security issues to remediate first. It’s a complete end-to-end vulnerability management solution that provides a risk-based view of your entire attack surface—from IT to cloud to containers—so you can quickly identify, investigate and prioritize vulnerabilities.

Data source description

Tenable.io data will be stored in the Devo platform in different tables according to its type. All these tables will follow this format:

  • vuln.tenable.io.{resource_name}

Tenable exposes REST APIs resources to extract data such as:

Resource type

Definition

Devo data tables

Resource type

Definition

Devo data tables

Agents

Nessus Agents are lightweight, low-footprint programs that you install locally on hosts to supplement traditional network-based scanning or to provide visibility into gaps that are missed by traditional scanning. Nessus Agents collect vulnerability, compliance, and system data, and report that information back to Tenable.io for analysis.

vuln.tenable.io.agents

Assets

Assets are defined as network entities that potentially represent security risks. Assets can include laptops, desktops, servers, routers, mobile phones, virtual machines, software containers, and cloud instances. Tenable.io allows you to track assets that belong to your organization, helping to eliminate potential security risks, identify under-utilized resources, and support compliance efforts.

There are two approaches to download assets:

  • Version 1.1.2 and before: Using directly the assets endpoints (and vulns endpoint for enrichment). However, this method is not suggested for big amounts of data; for this see the next option.

  • Version 1.2.0 and above: Using exports endpoint to get assets (and vulns for enrichment). Running one single pull cycle of this collector could take hours, depending on the amount of assets of the customer and the current load of Tenable’s servers, so it’s recommended to configure this service to run a maximum of 1 or 2 times per day. This service takes snapshots of all the assets.

vuln.tenable.io.assets

Audit_log

The audit log records events taking place in your organization's Tenable.io account. For each event, the log includes information about what action was taken, when the action was taken, the ID of the user, and the ID of the target entity. The audit log provides visibility into the actions that users in your organization are taking in Tenable.io, and can be helpful for identifying security issues and other potential problems.

vuln.tenable.io.audit_log

Plugins

Tenable.io plugins are programs for detecting vulnerabilities written in the Nessus Attack Scripting Language (NASL). Plugins contain vulnerability information, solution information, and the algorithm to test for the presence of the security issue.

vuln.tenable.io.plugins

Scanners

By default, Tenable.io is configured with a region-specific cloud scanner. In addition to using the default cloud scanner, you can also link Nessus scanners, NNM scanners, and Nessus Agents to Tenable.io.

vuln.tenable.io.scanners

Scans

Retrieves scans.

vuln.tenable.io.scans

Working with API credentials

To set up access to the Tenable.io API:

  • Verify that you have a valid user account with appropriate permissions by logging into Tenable.io.

  • Generate the API keys for the account. For more information, see Generate API Keys in the Tenable.io Vulnerability Management User Guide.

Tenable.io generates a unique set of API keys for each user account. These keys allow your application to authenticate to the Tenable.io API without creating a session.

To authorize your application to use the Tenable.io API, you must include the X-ApiKeys header element in your HTTP request messages.

Authorize user role permissions

The Basic permission applied for the X-ApiKeys would be enough to extract necessary data safely.

Name

Value

Description

Name

Value

Description

Basic

16

Users with this role can view and configure scan results.

You’ll need the Administrator[64] permission in order to request Audit_log data.

Run the collector

Once the data source is configured, you can either send us the required information if you want us to host and manage the collector for you (Cloud collector), or deploy and host the collector in your own machine using a Docker image (On-premise collector).

Change log

Release

Released on

Release type

Details

Recommendations

Release

Released on

Release type

Details

Recommendations

v1.2.5

Apr 5, 2023

IMPROVEMENTS

Improvements:

  • Upgrade DC SDK to the latest version 1.7.2.dev1 to avoid errors in the sender module. Those errors made the collector restart constantly.

  • Upgrade DC SDK to the latest version 1.7.2.dev1:

    • Added a lock to enhance sender object.

Recommended version

v1.2.0

Mar 22, 2023

NEW FEATURE
BUG FIXING

New features:

  • A new export_assets service has been created to allow massive data ingestion, enriched with vulnerabilities information. This data is collected through a different endpoint called exports, whose purpose is exporting big amounts of data. This service takes snapshots of all the assets available and it is recommended to configure it to run a maximum of 1-2 times per day.

  • The underlaying Devo Collector SDK has been upgraded from v1.1.4 to v1.6.4.dev1.

Bug fixing:

  • The collector was using a standard assets endpoint to get a lot of data and this was resulting in constant 500-level errors. The new service export_assets solves this.

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