Tenable
More info
- Creator
- Ron Gula, Renaud Deraison, Jack Huffard
- Released
- 2002
- Type
- Security company
The company behind the Nessus vulnerability scanner, and the textbook case of a free project closed off once it started paying.
Renaud Deraison wrote Nessus in 1998 as free software. In 2002 he founded Tenable Network Security in Maryland with Ron Gula and Jack Huffard, and in 2005 Nessus 3 went proprietary. Part of the community responded by forking the last free release into OpenVAS, which is still around.
Nessus became the de facto standard regardless: a scan that matches service versions against known CVEs and ranks the findings by CVSS score is part of countless audits and PCI DSS checks. Tenable listed in 2018 and these days mostly sells a unified view of the attack surface — which is Nessus with more dashboards.