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About this phase
Automated scanners like OpenVAS and Nessus compare your service inventory against huge vulnerability databases and produce a flood of findings. The skill is not running the scan — it is triage: validating which findings are real, discarding false positives, and ranking what remains with CVSS so the report leads with what actually matters. Benchmarks like the CIS controls give you a configuration yardstick to measure hardening against.
Scoring and prioritization here reuse the CVE & CVSS fundamentals. The methodology aligns with NIST SP 800-115, the standard for technical security testing.
Lessons
5 live
Phase
03 of 08
Status
Complete
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Lessons in this phase
03.01Live →
03.02Live →
03.03Live →
03.04Live →
03.05Live →
Vulnerability Scanning with OpenVAS
Setting up, targeting, and interpreting a full OpenVAS / Greenbone scan.
Scanning with Nessus
Policies, plugins, and report output in the industry-standard commercial scanner.
Validating & Triaging Findings
The human work: confirming real issues, killing false positives, prioritizing, and checking exploit-db for public exploits.
Scoring with CVSS
Base, temporal, and environmental metrics. Cross-links to the CVE & CVSS fundamentals page.
CIS Benchmarks & Hardening Baselines
Measuring a host against a known-good configuration standard.