I’ve had a pretty easy time using Nikto over the years. Nikto is a security scanner specific to web servers. I did a post on Nessus recently, but Nessus is a tool for looking at any service running on a system and trying to find available vulnerabilities. Nikto is can do many of the same things, but is specific and therefore more in depth for web servers. This involves looking at things like CGI directories and robots.txt files as well.
Nikto is written in Perl. In order to do everything Nikto can do there are a few perl mules that need to be installed. But let’s look at one of the easiest implementations available for Nikto, which is Yang (short for Yet Another Nikto GUI), available on the OS X App Store. Yang is so easy, you can literally install the app, type a domain name and hit Start to get started. Yang also runs the latest release of Nikto. Let’s look at what a basic scanning process looks like. To get started, open the App Store and search for Nikto. Yang appears, so click on Install by the name of the app.
Once installed, click on Yang in LaunchPad to fire up the scanner (or open from /Applications). When Yang opens, click on the Preferences in the toolbar. Go through each of the options and choose the ones that make the most sense for each scan you run. Keep in mind that each box can increase or decrease the amount of time scans require or the output of the scan drastically. The author of the app was kind enough to include tool tips for the options, very helpful.
Click back on the Scan icon in the toolbar and enter the name of the site to scan in the “Website to analyze” field. Then click on Launch.
The scan then begins. This might take some time. And not “go get some coffee time” but more like, “go take a nap time.” While the scan is running, click on Logs in the toolbar. Here, you can see the exact command run against Nikto.
If you download Nikto from cirt.net you can use these exact commands, although there will be a little work getting the app up and running, defining config files, etc. If you want to do anything (such as writing output to metasploit) then you might end up needing to go ahead and install manually. But if you’re just interested in running some quick scans as sanity checks for deployed configurations, etc then this is a nice little tool that is a bit too nice to be free. Especially given that the author went ahead and built out Nikto with LibWhiskers, SSL support and a few other goodies that aren’t required for a basic deployment. It’s also (IMHO) a really good example of putting a GUI wrapper around command line tools. I’ve played with a few other GUI overlays for Nikto and this one is by far the best one I’ve seen for OS X. Well worth the time to check it out!
