OpenVAS (Open Vulnerability Assessment System) is an open-source framework used for vulnerability scanning and management from Greenbone. It provides a set of tools and services to perform security testing on networks,systems and applications. It can be used to identify vulnerabilities, and generate detailed reports about them. OpenVAS is often used in ethical penetration testing to assess the security posture of systems and networks.
To begin, we will first update our repository. The commands below update the repository and upgrade it. I have used -y to accept the prompts in advance.
sudo apt update -y
sudo apt upgrade -y
We will now run the actual installation for openvas with the updated repository
sudo apt install openvas -y
Its a big download so you might wait for quite some time. We will now run the following command to start the postgre service.
gvm-setup
if you have an error, run the following command if not, proceed to the section that on using openvas
Stop the postgre service from running.
systemctl stop postgresql@14-main
Once we stop the service, we need to make sure that the port number is correct. So open the configuration file and change to port 5432. In this case, I use the vim command. Press i to insert, scroll to the section with the port number, change it to 5432 and save by pressing the escape key, then :wq!
vim /etc/postgresal/16/main/postgresql.conf
Once the port number is changed, you can then restart the service
systemctl restart postgresql
This should fix the error message. So run the setup command again and wait for it to complete
sudo gvm-setup
Make sure that everything is fine by running the command below that inspects the installation. If there are any problems to fix, the exact command to run will be shown at this step.
sudo gvm-check-setup
Change the default admin password using the following command. Replace "passwd" with your own new password.
sudo -E -u _gvm gvmd --user=admin --new-password=passwd
You can now start the service using the command shown below
gvm-start
Once started, you can then open the web GUI on 127.0.0.1:93932