Welcome to the game.
The war games are a series of episodes in which each player or team is both the blue team and the red team for attack-defense style competitions.
DO NOT SCAN DEVICES YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO OpenVAS and Nessus both try to access devices in various ways during the later stages of their scans.
OpenVAS will attempt a small ssh bruteforce attack on the server. If successful, you will have committed a felony under the CFAA*. Additionally, it will try to brute force FTP servers.
Nessus will attempt to screenshot VNC servers, and bruteforce FTP servers. These fall under the same as above.
TL;DR: NEVER SCAN A DEVICE YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO
nmap by default is fine though...
*Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act Title 18 U.S.Code Chapter 47 Part? § 1030
Throughout the War Games, you will learn many skills and become many things.
You will learn to become a competent red team member, someone who can effectively pivot from vulnerability scanning to exploitation. Additionally, you will learn how to look for new or non-scannable vulnerabilities, and build your own exploits.
You will learn how to build real web apps that perform different tasks, and their associated RESTful APIs securely. You will build these web apps and RESTful APIs with what ever language you choose, and master it.
You will be forced to learn enough about new programming languages to be able to read code, and understand what is going on. You will learn all of the terms and programming techniques to be able to google your way through any development task in any language.
You will learn how to use Linux servers. Real Linux servers. You will learn how to run services on them, how to secure them, how to operate on them. You will become amazing with Linux using only the terminal.
You will learn this all through failure. When someone breaks your code, and points out a flaw, it is the most valuable learning opportunity you will receive. If you fail here, that is good. If you fail in the real world, there are consequences.