Open Vulnerability Assessment System (OpenVAS) is freeware that is a vulnerability scanner and management suite. OpenVAS and Nessus are similar; in fact, OpenVAS was forked from the last free version of Nessus before it went proprietary. In this recipe, we will cover how to install and perform a scan with OpenVAS.
Vulnerability scanning with OpenVAS
Getting ready
To use OpenVAS to perform vulnerability scanning, you will need to have a remote system available for scanning. In the examples provided, an instance of Metasploitable2 is used to perform this task. For more information on how to set up Metasploitable2, refer to Chapter 1, Getting Started.