Firewall is blocking my scans

Hi, can someone please help. I’ve scheduled scans to scan my entire network and those run from Mon-Fri. But there is no report returned. It’s like my Firewall is blocking me. Is it advisable for me to maybe whitelist my host so that the scanner can go through and scan the network?

Hi! You said that there is no report at all - if the firewall was blocking the scans, there would be a report, albeit empty. Maybe you should check your scanner’s logs at /var/log/gvm/openvas.log to determine if anything went wrong with the scan itself.

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Ow yes sorry the report is there but it’s empty

There’s two options:

  1. Your firewall is blocking your connection attempts completely. In this case the Alive Test will fail and consequently, no hosts are scanned.
  2. Your firewall filters traffic to the target systems. In this case, it may not be possible to determine with the default alive test if the target host is alive. You could use “Consider alive” as “Alive Test” option when creating the target. Note that all selected targets will be considered as alive, which can increase scan time dramatically.

In any case, I’d recommend to check the logs of your firewall.

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Okay thanks I’ll do that

Hi again, so to check the scanner’s logs do I enter that command on the Kali Terminal?
Then “Consider as alive” option is not working

To read a file, you can use multiple commands. Commonly used commands are:

  • The cat command is used to read the entire file
  • The less command is used to create a scrollable version of the contents of the file to not clutter your console too much
  • The tail command is used to display the last lines of a file, i.e. tail -n 10 <file> will show the last 10 lines of the input file.

It appears to me that you may need some basic information about GNU/Linux commands, a good source can be found here.


Then “Consider as alive” option is not working

What exactly do you mean by “not working”? Is there any error message or other indication that the process failed? Did nothing happen at all? Please specify.

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