Getting Started with OpenVAS

OpenVAS, by Greenbone Networks, is a publicly available vulnerability scanner. Greenbone Networks has an entire Vulnerability Manager, part of which is the OpenVAS scanner. Greenbone's Vulnerability Manager is also open to the public and free to use. OpenVAS has the capabilities to perform network scans, including authenticated and unauthenticated testing.

The web interface can be accessed at https://< IP >:8080

We will get started with using OpenVAS by following the installation instruction below for Parrot Security. The tool is pre-installed on the host provided in a later section.

Installing Package

First, we can start by installing the tool:

$ sudo apt-get update && apt-get -y full-upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install gvm && openvas

Next, to begin the installation process, we can run the following command below:

$ gvm-setup

This will begin the setup process and take up to 30 minutes.

Starting OpenVas

Finally, we can start OpenVas:

$ gvm-start