Article by Dan Nanni first published on xmodulo.com
As a system administrator, Linux security technician or system auditor, your responsibility can involve any combination of these: software patch management, malware scanning, file integrity checks, security audit, configuration error checking, etc. If there is an automatic vulnerability scanning tool, it can save you a lot of time checking up on common security issues.
One such vulnerability scanner on Linux is lynis. This tool is actually supported on multiple platforms including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, Mac OS and Ubuntu.