ServerBuddies Support Blog

Nessus

The official website at the following URL: http://www.nessus.org/

Nessus is a full-service security scanner. The plug-in architecture of Nessus allows users to customize it for their systems and networks. As with any scanner, Nessus is only as good as the signature database it relies upon. Fortunately, Nessus is frequently updated and features full reporting, host scanning, and real-time vulnerability searches. Remember that there could be false positives and false negatives, even in a tool as powerful and as frequently updated as Nessus.

Nikto

Nikto can be found at the following URL: http://cirt.net/nikto2

Nikto is an excellent common gateway interface (CGI) script scanner. Nikto not only checks for CGI vulnerabilities but does so in an evasive manner, so as to elude intrusion detection systems.

If you have Web servers serving up CGI scripts, Nikto can be an excellent resource for checking the security of these servers.

Nikto web server assessment tool

nikto - web server security scanner

Nikto is a web server assessment tool. It is designed to find various default and insecure files, configurations and programs on any type of web server.

Requirements

Any system which supports a basic PERL installation should allow Nikto to run. It has been extensively tested on. For SSL support the Net::SSLeay PERL module must be installed (which in turn requires OpenSSL on the Unix platform).

The nmap scanner can also be used, if desired. In some cases using nmap will slow down Nikto execution, as it must call an external program. For scanning many ports across one or more servers, using nmap will be faster than using Nikto’s internal PERL scanning.

Download

Unpack the download file:

Basic Testing

The most basic Nikto scan requires simply a host to target, since port 80 is assumed if none is specified. The host can either be an IP or a hostname of a machine, and is specified using the -h (-host) option. This will scan the IP 192.168.0.1 on TCP port 80:

To check on a different port, specify the port number with the -p (-port) option. This will scan the IP 192.168.0.1 on TCP port 443:

Hosts, ports and protocols may also be specified by using a full URL syntax, and it will be scanned:

There is no need to specify that port 443 may be SSL, as Nikto will first test regular HTTP and if that fails, HTTPS. If you are sure it is an SSL server, specifying -s (-ssl) will speed up the test.