A significant outage has affected Tenable’s Nessus vulnerability scanner agents, causing systems to go offline across multiple continents since December 31st. The issue stems from problematic differential plugin updates affecting Nessus Agent versions 10.8.0 and 10.8.1.

Impact and Response
– Systems affected across Americas, Europe, and Asia
– Tenable has disabled plugin feed updates for affected versions
– Version 10.8.2 released as a fix
– Previous versions (10.8.0 and 10.8.1) have been withdrawn

Required Customer Actions
1. Upgrade to Nessus Agent version 10.8.2 or downgrade to 10.7.3
2. Perform plugin reset for systems using agent profiles
3. Manual installation of version 10.8.2 required
4. Execute plugin reset via provided script or nessuscli reset command

The company plans to resume the plugin feed service to enable plugin downloads. This incident follows a similar but more severe outage in July 2024, when a CrowdStrike Falcon update caused widespread system failures affecting various sectors including banking, aviation, healthcare, and media organizations.

Tenable has implemented preventive measures by disabling problematic versions and providing detailed recovery instructions in the Nessus Agent 10.8.2 release notes to prevent further disruptions.