Nikto-Vulnerability Scanner Tutorial

In the field of web application security there are so many tools available to measure the security of a web application, these tools available for different operating system and can use to find out the bug on a web application. In the era of these tools we have nikto also.

Nikto is not a new tool, it is used by a large community to find the vulnerability on a web application.

• Nikto is open source
• It can check a web server for over 6400 potentially dangerous files/CGIs.
• It checks for outdated versions of over 1000 servers, and version specific problems on over 270 servers
• It checks the plug in and misconfiguration files.
• Fast
• Effective
• It find out the default files and programs
• It find out the insecure files and programs

Key Features

• Full HTTP proxy support
• Apache user name enumeration
• Logging to metasploit
• Secure Socket Layer support (SSL)
• Subdomain brute forcing (guessing)
• Easy to update
• Save report on multiple format

Requirement

• A operating system that has perl install in it
• OpenSSL: http://www.openssl.org/
• ActiveState Perl: http://www.activestate.com/

Download

Nikto Tutorial

• The basic scan requires a host to scan, you can use a IP of the server of just host name.

$ perl nikto.pl -h [target host]

• For help 

$ perl nikto.pl -H

• If you want to check different port than use

$ perl nikto.pl -h [target host] -p [port number]

• If you want this test via proxy than you can use by this command

$ perl nikto.pl -h [target host] -useproxy http://localhost:8080/

• Now for updating nikto use

$ perl nikto.pl -update

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