Back in September, I’ve blogged about a relatively new feature added to Nessus that provides information about the availability of an exploit for vulnerabilities identified during the scan. I wrote then:

This is an incredibly valuable information that will allow you to prioritize your remediation actions. For instance, you could elect to plug critical vulnerabilities for which there is a public exploit then move on to the medium ones for which there is also a public exploit and so on.

This feature has recently improved. The .nessus v2 XML reports tells you now if the exploit is available in Immunity CANVAS and/or Metasploit.

If an exploit is available in CANVAS, the exploit_framework_canvas subnode of the ReportItem XML node will be set to true. Moreover, the canvas_package subnode will tell you in which CANVAS package the exploit can be found.

If an exploit is available in Metasploit, the exploit_framework_metasploit subnode of the ReportItem XML node will be set to true. In case Metasploit has an exploit for the identified vulnerability, the metasploit_name subnode will provide its name. Here is an example:

<metasploit_name>Microsoft ASN.1 Library Bitstring Heap Overflow</metasploit_name>

This is particularly interesting as Metasploit 3.5.x allows you to control Nessus, import the scan results and display only the vulnerabilities for which there is a Metasploit exploit.