OpenVAS, also known as Greenbone, is a security vulnerability scanner. In this post, I’ll show you a step-by-step method to get OpenVAS up and running on an Ubuntu 18.04 Server so you can automate security scanning of your systems.
The first thing we’ll do, of course, is to make sure that our Ubuntu 18.04 server is all up-to-date:
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade
Next, we’ll add the repository for OpenVAS and update apt again:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mrazavi/openvas sudo apt update
Our next step is to install some dependencies, OpenVAS itself, and some supporting packages that will allow us to generate nicely formatted reports automatically:
sudo apt install sqlite3 sudo apt install openvas9 sudo apt install texlive-latex-extra --no-install-recommends sudo apt install texlive-fonts-recommended sudo apt install libopenvas9-dev
Once all of that is installed we’ll update the security feeds that OpenVAS uses to keep up-to-date on threat profiles. This process can take a while, so be prepared to wait around for a while as you execute these commands:
sudo greenbone-nvt-sync udo greenbone-scapdata-sync sudo greenbone-certdata-sync
Now that all of that is done, we’ll go ahead and restart all the openvas services to make sure everything is working the way it should:
sudo systemctl restart openvas-scanner sudo systemctl restart openvas-manager sudo systemctl restart openvas-gsa
If anything fails to start we’ll need to do some troubleshooting, but it should go fine. If everything starts ok, we’ll enable all of the services so they start up on boot:
sudo systemctl enable openvas-scanner sudo systemctl enable openvas-manager sudo systemctl enable openvas-gsa
Once you get everything installed and running you can navigate to OpenVAS in your browser, at:
https://[Your Server IP]:4000
The default administrative account will be called “admin” and have “admin” as the password.
You can find extensive documentation on how to use OpenVAS at the Greenbone User Documentation page.