Looking for vulnerabilities with OpenVAS and Greenbone
With the never-ending onslaught of hackers penetrating networks, most system administrators need a way of identifying vulnerabilities in a simple, consistent, and repeatable fashion. Wouldn't it be nice if users had a simple means for running a series of automated checks to identify known security problems?
One powerful and popular security analysis tool is The Open Vulnerability Assessment System, or OpenVAS. OpenVAS is actually a framework that supports scanning and reporting on your system's vulnerabilities. Scan a system, and OpenVAS will provided a detailed list of security issues. OpenVAS efficiently organizes the information, offering important details on the problem and what to do about it.
OpenVAS is available for download as a virtual appliance and is included in some security toolkits. The OpenVAS security scanner is often bundled with other security tools into specialized security-themed Linux distributions. A dedicated security distro can save you time, because you have more tools readily available depending on what you turn up with your analysis. Kali Linux is one of the more popular distributions, and Kali includes OpenVAS.
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