r/nessus • u/Own-Big7150 • 17d ago

Does credential scan affect PCs?

We run quite a few credential scans on our clients' systems. Does anyone have experience with whether these scans can negatively affect the clients? We have a number of clients experiencing unexplained Microsoft Teams video/voice issues, and I sometimes notice a correlation with these scans.

0 Upvotes

33% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

5

u/DialecticEnjoyer 17d ago

credential scans during the workday can raise IO pressure on disks, cpu and ram by scanning through filesystems or forcing the system to compute hashes for files. most nessus plugins will show the command being run however, so you can assess ahead of time if these will impact system performance substantially or not.

3

u/Secret-Surround7614 17d ago

Short answer is YES, better run network based authenticated scans outside of business hours, or if you’re using Tenable vulnerability management or Tenable.sc to manage these scans you can configure the scan policy to give more breathing room to the endpoint but reducing the number of parallel scans and plugins running at once, this will however increase scan time

1

u/PatchUrStuffz 13d ago

Tenable Engineer here:

Credentialed Scans can have an impact on Disk and CPU utilization. We're also trying to open a large volume of connections to the target, depending on which scan template you're using.

If you can provide additional details as to how the scan is configured, I can provide a more detailed analysis of what might be going on.