tissynbe.py -- Insert Nessus results into MySQL, output as a CSV

I mentioned in previous posts that I had been working with Nessus -- I used it a lot. At the end of the engagement, we had almost a gigabyte of Nessus data saved in nbe format. So to quickly go through and analyze all the results, inserting it into a database was essential. I was using Nessquick at the time, which was a couple of Perl scripts used for inserting the data into a database and exporting the data. I also had a bunch of sed and awk scripts that would then clean up the results and fix various punctuation and presentation issues I didn't like. The process became a bit tedious, so I decided to write up a Python script to do all this for me.

Here are some example uses from the usage:

./tissynbe.py -d database -f results.nbe ./tissynbe.py -d database -o output.csv ./tissynbe.py -d database -o output.csv --order scriptid --sort desc ./tissynbe.py -d database -o output.csv --count ./tissynbe.py -f results.nbe -o output.csv ./tissynbe.py -f results.nbe -d database -o output.csv

You can download tissynbe.py from the tissynbe.py project page.

Now here's where I ask for some help. I'm by no means a programming guru, so to all you Python developers and hackers, if you can take a look at my code and offer any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it. I think I have a handle on most of the code as it's fairly straightforward, but I think it could use some tweaking and optimization in the clean_nbe() method.

Comments and suggestions are encouraged!

Posted by Marcin on Friday, May 23, 2008 in Code and Security.