Network Security Tools

Using Nikto

Using Nikto is fairly straightforward. The main required arguments are the target host and port against which the scan will be conducted. If no port is specified, port 80 (the default) is used. All command-line options except for -debug, -update, -dbcheck, and -verbose are available by using the first letter as a short-form option. Execute the program with no arguments, and a description of all available options along with module-loading warning messages will be displayed. You’ll see the warning messages if support modules such as SSL are not installed correctly.

Here are the options you have available to you:

Cgidirs

This allows you to manually set a single CGI directory from which to start all tests. It overrides any of the CGI directory entries made in config.txt. Additionally it accepts the values all or none. all forces the core plug-in to run checks against every CGI directory specified in config.txt. none runs all CGI checks against the webroot (/).

cookies

This prints out cookies if the web server attempts to set them.

evasion+

LibWhisker lets you apply up to nine different URI obfuscation techniques to each request, with the goal of bypassing intrusion detection systems (IDSes) that do strict signature matching and no URI normalization/conversion. After seeing the evasion options by running Nikto with no arguments, specify as many of these numeric options as you want and they will be applied. For example:

$perl ./nikto.pl -h www.example.com -e 3489

findonly