Solution

• OpenVAS (Open Vulnerability Assessment System)

• The Open Vulnerability Assessment System (OpenVAS) collects and manages security information for networks, devices, and systems.

• OpenVAS scans through a network to identify known network misconfigurations and known vulnerabilities associated with common services and software.

• Vulnerability detections are defined in scripts called Network Vulnerability Tests (NVTs).

• OpenVAS uses client/server architecture.

• The OpenVAS server keeps track of all of the different vulnerability results against the systems it discovers.

• The server uses its own database to manage users which is independent of the server’s host operating system.

• Remote users access the server via an OpenVAS client to manage scans.

• OpenVAS is smart. It uses a variety of probing techniques to recognize services running on any port. It also uses service’s identity based on the default Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) port number.

• If you have a web server running on TCP port 8888, the OpenVAS scanner will find it and run web- related NVTs (Network Vulnerability Tests) against it.

• If the scanner doesn’t find a web server on one of its targets, then it skips unnecessary tests for that system.

• Sometimes this activity is dangerous because a successful exploit might crash the system you are scanning or causing data loss.

• OpenVAS describes the relative intrusiveness of tests and marks the more dangerous ones so that users can more easily enable or disable them for a scan.

• The OpenVAS reporting is extensive, well organized, and available in different formats. Each report collects the details of discovered vulns and aggregates them into an estimate of risk.

• Some advantages of Open VAS (Open Vulnerability Assessment System) are:

  • The OpenVAS user interface displays the aggregated information from all tasks so that this information helps you to visualize the overall risk associated with the targets you have defined.

  • The flexibility of the tool to import new tests (NVTs) on a daily basis. The power of the NVTs lies in the flexibility of the scripting language. This helps developers to define techniques for identifying new software packages, new services, and new vulnerabilities.