This is a basic nikto tutorial for kali linux. It will get you started with nikto. For advanced usage, see ‘man nikto’ or the cirt website
Nikto is a web application scanner – it will scan a web service and look for known vulnerabilities. It can be very useful to perform a quick test against a web application.
Nikto tutorial: Basic usage
nikto -h example.com
There isnt much output, so you generally dont know whats happening, so it might be good to enable verbose output:
nikto -Display V -h example.com
One of the great things you can do with nikto is to specify the type of checks it runs:
from the man page:
-Tuning
Tuning options will control the test that Nikto will use against
a target. By default, if any options are specified, only those
tests will be performed. If the “x” option is used, it will
reverse the logic and exclude only those tests. Use the reference number or letter to specify the type, multiple may be used:
- 0 – File Upload
- 1 – Interesting File / Seen in logs
- 2 – Misconfiguration / Default File
- 3 – Information Disclosure
- 4 – Injection (XSS/Script/HTML)
- 5 – Remote File Retrieval – Inside Web Root
- 6 – Denial of Service
- 7 – Remote File Retrieval – Server Wide
- 8 – Command Execution / Remote Shell
- 9 – SQL Injection
- a – Authentication Bypass
- b – Software Identification
- c – Remote Source Inclusion
- x – Reverse Tuning Options (i.e., include all except specified)
The given string will be parsed from left to right, any x characters will apply to all characters to the right of the character.
Specifying the test
So, to only perform an SQL injection test against your target:
nikto -Tuning 9 -h example.com
or to run everything except DOS
nikto -Tuning x 6 -h example.com
Saving results
You can output to a file with the -o option
You can specify the format of the output file with -Format [csv htm txt or xml]
eg to perform an SQL injection test and save results to an html file with verbose output for your terminal:
nikto -Display V -o results.html -Format htm -Tuning 9 -h example.com
You might also like my metasploit tutorial
