Vulnerability assessment
1. Vulnerability assessment using openVAS
2. Vulnerability assessment using Nessus
Windows version. Scanning with a policy
3. Vulnerability assessment using GFI LanGuard
Windows tool
4. Nikto scanner
Nikto help
start the scan
-h specifies the targer
-Tuning scan perimenters, x specifies run all scans against the target
Finding cgi directories
saving the scan
-o filename where result will be saved
-F file type
Scanning on other ports
Nikto Plugins
Plugins further extend the capabilities of Nikto. Using information gathered from our basic scans, we can pick and choose plugins that are appropriate to our target. You can use the --list-plugins
flag with Nikto to list the plugins or view the whole list in an easier to read format online.
Some interesting plugins include:
We can specify the plugin we wish to use by using the-Plugin
argument and the name of the plugin we wish to use...For example, to use the "apacheuser" plugin, our Nikto scan would look like so:
Tuning Your Scan for Vulnerability Searching
Nikto has several categories of vulnerabilities that we can specify our scan to enumerate and test for. The following list is not extensive and only include the ones that you may commonly use. We can use the -Tuning
flag and provide a value in our Nikto scan:
Saving Your Findings
Rather than working with the output on the terminal, we can instead, just dump it directly into a file for further analysis - making our lives much easier!
Nikto is capable of putting to a few file formats including:
Text File
HTML report
We can use the -o
argument (short for -Output
) and provide both a filename and compatible extension. We can specify the format (-f
) specifically, but Nikto is smart enough to use the extension we provide in the-o
argument to adjust the output accordingly.
For example, let's scan a web server and output this to "report.html": nikto -h http://ip_address -o report.html
Verbosing our Scan
We can increase the verbosity of our Nikto scan by providing the following arguments with the-Display
flag. Unless specified, the output given by Nikto is not the entire output, as it can sometimes be irrelevant (but that isn't always the case!)
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