Hi, and welcome to Technical Weakness Identification with Nikto.
My name is Lee,
and in this course I provide explanations and hands‑on demonstrations of how
you can use Nikto towards the identification of vulnerabilities associated
with application servers and web application.
Nikto is a free and open source web server and application
assessment tool created by Chris Sullo and David Lodge.
Nikto was written in Perl and was originally released in late 2001.
The primary function of Nikto is to identify security
weaknesses such as default files,
misconfigurations, or published security vulnerabilities.
I would like to thank Chris and David for creating and maintaining this
excellent tool. Nikto has been released under the GNU General Public License
and is copyrighted by CIRT. Nikto leverages LibWhisker,
which is copyrighted by Jeff Forristal.
The primary function of Nikto involves scanning web servers
in order to identify vulnerabilities.
It can identify outdated components and allows you to replay findings
so that you can validate them manually after a test has been completed
or mitigations have been implemented.
Nikto can also be used to identify server and software misconfigurations,
as well as to locate default, insecure, or even dangerous files and scripts.
In addition,
it also offers full proxy support so that you can use it
with powerful tools such as Burp Suite Pro.
So let's take a look at the kill chain. Nikto helps an attacker understand
the target and to identify misconfigurations and vulnerabilities during
the reconnaissance phase of the kill chain.
This information then enhances the other stages.
For instance,
if you find a vulnerability during a Nikto scan, what you have
learned can then be used during the exploitation phase to
understand how to compromise the target.
So the MITRE PRE‑ATT&CK framework provides you with a long list of tactics
and techniques that real‑life adversaries may use. The primary function of
Nikto falls directly within PRE‑ATT&CK's technical weakness identification
tactic and directly leverages two techniques, which are T1293, analyze
application security posture,
which is focused on probing the victim's network in order to
find application configuration weaknesses, and T1288, analyze
architecture and configuration posture,
which covers the analysis of the results that scanning tools provide
after identifying misconfigurations or other security issues that
might impact networks and infrastructure.
And as with any hacking tool,
you must ensure that you have proper authorization before starting any
scans or performing other actions against a target.
Do not use Nikto against targets that you do not own or that you
have not received explicit permission to test from someone that
actually has the authority to do so.
When you launch a default Nikto scan,
it sends thousands and thousands of requests to the target.
It then indexes the responses so that it can analyze
them to identify misconfigurations, outdated components,
outdated and vulnerable software versions and server versions,
and dangerous files and scripts.
This information can then be used towards any other stages of attack.