Ethical Hacking and Network Defense: Choose Your Best Network Vulnerability Scanning Tool

Hands-on ethical hacking and network defense has become an essential component in teaching cybersecurity. However, without understanding vulnerabilities in a computer system, it would be difficult to conduct successful network defense in order to prevent intruders in the real world. Therefore, teaching ethical hacking and vulnerability scanning is a key element to the success of cybersecurity curriculum. In this paper, we review the state of the art of current open source vulnerability scanning tools. A virtual lab environment is introduced as part of our lab design. We present our designed hands-on labs in detail using vulnerability scanning tool OpenVAS. We review outcomes after conducting the hands-on labs in our cybersecurity courses and identify future work for open research areas.