Home / Business & Management / Cyber Security / Advanced Cyber Security Training: Network Security / Scanning Tools and Methodology Continued
Scanning Tools and Methodology Continued
In this video, you will learn SpiderFoot and Nikto as alternate scanning tools.
Now, the next tool we’re going to take a look at is SpiderFoot. Now, SpiderFoot is a really popular program. And this one I’m running out of the Trace Lab OSINT virtual machine I have here. So let me back up here. And this is a really good program. I like it a lot. It’s again, Windows, Linux, OSX. I’m using the Trace Lab OSINT virtual machine because, one, it’s free, and also, it’s preloaded on there. So once you run it whatever host you’re using, it’s pretty easy to use. So under Scan Name we just enter in whatever we want to add in or call it. I’m just going to add Test.
Now, under Seed Target, this is a target that we’re going to be scanning. So as you see, there’s a lot of options here. We can scan domain names, IPv4, IPv6 addresses, hostname, subdomains, subnets, ASNs, email addresses, phone numbers, that person’s name, and even a user name. So we have a lot of different options we could use to run these scans.
So we’re going to go ahead and enter in one of my email addresses here. And then you see down in here, there’s a lot of different options here that we could run. We can do all which gets anything and everything about your target. We could do a footprint, understand what information the target exposes on the internet. Investigate, best for when you suspect a target to be malicious but need more information. So this will do some basic footprinting, will be allowed in addition to creating blacklists. Some other sources may have information about your target’s maliciousness. Or we could do a passive scan when you don’t want your target to even suspect they’re being investigated.
So once you figure out what type of scan you want to run, you click the big Run Scan button on the bottom there. And then it’s going to start the scan. So the first thing you’ll see is no data. If the scan is still running, please try again soon. So if we actually click over to the Status button over here, we can actually see the status as starting or running. And when it finishes, you will see some data there. So once everything is done, you can actually - let me go back in there real quick.
Once everything is done on the scan, you can actually see how many total things were found, how many were unique, if there were any error messages. We can go to Browse where we can see more data if we click on any of these, so Instagram, Kongregate, Pastebin. We could see the email addresses, raw names, user names. We could take a look at a graph. We could take a look at the scan settings.
So if we want to go back and figure out what type of scan we ran against it, again, there’s more information there that we could take a look at. And of course, different settings we can kind of tweak with.
So the next tool we’re going to take a look at it’s called Nikto. Now, Nikto is another command line program. It’s designed for website vulnerability scanning. Now, for this one, I’m back on the Kali Linux machine because Kali has a preinstalled on there. Now, it’s pretty easy to use if you simply type in nikto -h for host, space, and whatever the URL is. We can scan that particular website to get more information, and potentially, any vulnerabilities on that particular website. So once we have that, we could hit Enter. And this is just going to be a very basic scan here.
Now, if we take a look at it, it gives us our target IP, target hostname, the target port address, the start time, what it’s running. This particular one is running on Apache, anti-clickjack and X-Frame. What is present, not present. Access XSS protection, whether it’s on there or not, x content header, and what not. So that’ll give us some basic information. Now, as we see here, Zenmap has - or, I’m sorry. Nikto, rather, has a lot of different options that we can run, not just a default scan. We could do no 404 meaning disables 404 checks, disables using SSL. We could write an output file for this. We could use the port.
We could scan specific ports for the target that we’re taking a look at. We could force SSL mode on a port, and so on, and so on. So we could get very granular and we can change up the options quite a bit with Nikto. Even though it looks like a very simple program, it’s actually a pretty powerful one.
So wrapping up, scanning can - in the scanning phase, not only malicious scan or malicious hackers scan your network, but what they’re looking for is they also can scan your servers, websites, email addresses, IP addresses, and much more. Scanning phase can reveal network vulnerabilities, open ports, user accounts, and a lot more information. That’s why we need to be very careful and be very mindful about what we’re actually broadcasting out there. And by using the same tools or similar tools, we can run our own vulnerability scans and try to fix any issues before they become a problem.
So in the next video, we’re going to be talking about social engineering. Thank you for watching. I’ll see you in the next video.
In this video, you will learn SpiderFoot and Nikto as alternate scanning tools.
SpiderFoot and Nikto are two other scanning tools that can be used to protect your network. It’s important to understand what your options are when selecting a scanning tool. After watching this video and the previous video, you will have a good overview of three scanning tools, an understanding of their strengths and vulnerabilities, and how to compare different tools will help you to make your selection when comparing other tools as well.
Reflect and share: Now that you have a better understanding of Nmap/Zenmap, SpiderFoot, and Nikto, which of these scanning tools would you prefer to use, and why? Share your comments in the section below.
This article is from the online course:
Advanced Cyber Security Training: Network Security
Created by
This article is from the free online
Advanced Cyber Security Training: Network Security
Reach your personal and professional goals
Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates.
Join over 18 million learners to launch, switch or build upon your career, all at your own pace, across a wide range of topic areas.
