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Nessus is a great tool designed to automate the testing and discovery of known security problems. Typically someone, a hacker group, a security company, or a researcher discovers a specific way to violate the security of a software product. The discovery may be accidental or through directed research; the vulnerability, in various levels of detail, is then released to the security community. Nessus is designed to help identify and solve these known problems, before a hacker takes advantage of them. Nessus is a great tool with lots of capabilities. However it is fairly complex and few articles exist to direct the new user through the intricacies of how to install and use it. Thus, this article shall endeavor to cover the basics of Nessus setup and configuration. The features of the current versions of Nessus (Nessus 2.0.8a and NessusWX 1.4.4) will be discussed.