LINNAEUS
Asset Classification
Category · Discovery
"Give every host its name and its rank."
Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, gave every living thing its name and rank. Asset Classification does the same for your estate — sorting every host into a clean class and OS lineage, so the rest of the pack knows exactly what it’s looking at.

The Problem

You can’t prioritize, own, or report on an estate you can’t name. Raw scan data knows an IP has findings — but not whether it’s a domain controller, a lab laptop, a camera, or a hypervisor. Every downstream decision (criticality, ownership, patch windows) depends on that missing identity.

What It Does

Linnaeus classifies every asset by what it is — Windows / Linux / macOS workstation or server, network device, IoT (by device type), OT, or hypervisor — reading operating_system with a plugin-output fallback when the OS field is blank. It shows classification coverage, the class + OS-lineage breakdown, and tags each asset Class:<x> / by OS on your approval.

Key Capabilities

  • Content-first classification — derives class from OS, device signals, and plugin evidence, not a guess.
  • OS lineage — rolls OS up to family (Windows / Linux / macOS) and down to version (Windows Server 2022, Ubuntu 22.04).
  • Coverage you can see — a live percentage of the fleet that carries a classification, so blind spots are on the record.
  • Gated tagging — tag all by class or by OS in one action — proposed, previewed, and written only on confirm.

How It Works

Reads assets, tags, and plugin output from navi.db, buckets each host into a class and OS lineage using the rules the repo ships, and proposes Class:<x> tags you review before anything is written. Empty OS fields fall back to OS-identification plugin output, so classification still works on partially-scanned hosts.

Who It’s For

Teams standing up asset ownership and criticality; anyone whose Tenable One risk scores are skewed because assets aren’t typed; reporting that needs class-level rollups.

Proof Points

Linnaeus is the taxonomy layer under the rest of the pack — Anubis calibrates criticality by class, Atlas assigns owners by segment, and Daedalus rolls findings up by asset class. Unclassified counts are surfaced, never hidden.

Works Better With

Feeds Anubis (criticality by class), Atlas (ownership by segment), and Daedalus (class-level dashboards). Complements Cerberus, which names IoT / OT devices at the network edge.

Why It’s Different

  • What it is, not just what’s wrong — classification is about identity, the missing key most tools skip.
  • Works on incomplete data — a plugin-output fallback classifies hosts even when the OS field is blank.
  • Honest coverage — unclassified assets are counted and shown, not quietly dropped.
Ask Linnaeus to classify the estate — then let the pack act on a fleet that finally knows what it is.
THE HOUNDS — human-in-the-loop AI security agents for Tenable VM / Tenable One Gated writes · Evidence-first · Honest about coverage