Remote Vulnerabilities | 129

quickly. To get started with the wizard, you navigate to the Scans menu and select
Tasks. At the top left of that page, you will see some small icons. The purple one that
looks like a wizard’s wand opens the Task Wizard. 
Figure 4-6
shows the menu that
pops up when you roll your cursor over that icon.
Figure 4-6. Task Wizard menu
From that menu, you can select the Advanced Task Wizard, which gives you more
control over assets and credentials, among other settings. You can also select the Task
Wizard, which you can see in 
Figure 4-7
. Using the Task Wizard, you will be promp‐
ted for a target IP address. The IP address that is populated when it’s brought up is
the IP address of the host from which you are connected to the server. You can enter
not only a single IP address here—such as the one seen in 
Figure 4-7
, 192.168.86.45—
but also an entire network. For my case, I would use 192.168.86.0/24. That is the
entire network range from 192.168.86.0–255. The 
/24
is a way of designating network
ranges without using subnet masks or a range notation. You will see this a lot, and it’s
commonly called 
CIDR notation
, which is the Classless Inter-Domain Routing nota‐
tion.
Figure 4-7. Task Wizard
130 | Chapter 4: Looking for Vulnerabilities

Once you have entered your target or targets, all you need to do is click Start Scan,
and OpenVAS is off to the races, so to speak. You have started your very first vulnera‐
bility scan.
It may be useful to have some vulnerable systems around when you
are running your scans. Although you can get various systems (and
a simple web search for vulnerable operating systems will turn
them up) one is really useful. Metasploitable 2 is a deliberately vul‐
nerable Linux installation. Metasploitable 3 is the updated version
based on Windows Server 2008. Metasploitable 2 is a straight-up
download. Metasploitable 3 is a build-it-on-your-own-system
operating system. It requires VirtualBox and additional software.
We’ll get into doing a scan from end to end, but let’s take a look at the Advanced Scan
Wizard, shown in 
Figure 4-8
. This will give you a quick look ahead to what we will be
working with on a larger scale when we move to creating scans from start to finish.
Figure 4-8. Advanced Scan Wizard

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