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

nikto -H

start the scan

nikto -h islamabadtrafficpolice.gov.pk -Tuning x

-h specifies the targer

-Tuning scan perimenters, x specifies run all scans against the target

Finding cgi directories

nikto -h certifiedhacker.com -Cgidirs all

saving the scan

nikto -h certifiedhacker.com -o result -F txt

-o filename where result will be saved

-F file type

Scanning on other ports

nikto -h 10.10.10.1 -p 80,8000,8080

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:

nikto -h 10.10.10.1 -Plugin apacheuser

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 -Tuningflag 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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