WhatWeb identifies websites. Its goal is to answer the question, “What is that Website?”. WhatWeb recognises web technologies including content management systems (CMS), blogging platforms, statistic/analytics packages, JavaScript libraries, web servers, and embedded devices. WhatWeb has over 1700 plugins, each to recognise something different. WhatWeb also identifies version numbers, email addresses, account IDs, web framework modules, SQL errors, and more.
WhatWeb can be stealthy and fast, or thorough but slow. WhatWeb supports an aggression level to control the trade off between speed and reliability. When you visit a website in your browser, the transaction includes many hints of what web technologies are powering that website. Sometimes a single webpage visit contains enough information to identify a website but when it does not, WhatWeb can interrogate the website further. The default level of aggression, called ‘stealthy’, is the fastest and requires only one HTTP request of a website. This is suitable for scanning public websites. More aggressive modes were developed for use in penetration tests.
Most WhatWeb plugins are thorough and recognise a range of cues from subtle to obvious. For example, most WordPress websites can be identified by the meta HTML tag, e.g. ”, but a minority of WordPress websites remove this identifying tag but this does not thwart WhatWeb. The WordPress WhatWeb plugin has over 15 tests, which include checking the favicon, default installation files, login pages, and checking for “/wp-content/” within relative links.
Features:
- Over 1700 plugins
- Control the trade off between speed/stealth and reliability
- Plugins include example URLs
- Performance tuning. Control how many websites to scan concurrently.
- Multiple log formats: Brief (greppable), Verbose (human readable), XML, JSON, MagicTree, RubyObject, MongoDB, SQL, and ElasticSearch.
- Proxy support including TOR
- Custom HTTP headers
- Basic HTTP authentication
- Control over webpage redirection
- Nmap-style IP ranges
- Fuzzy matching
- Result certainty awareness
- Custom plugins defined on the command line
Using WhatWeb on a couple of websites:
Using a higher aggression level to identify the version of Joomla in use.
Help
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WhatWeb - Next generation web scanner.
Version 0.4.7 by Andrew Horton aka urbanadventurer from Security-Assessment.com
Homepage: http://www.morningstarsecurity.com/research/whatweb
Usage: whatweb [options]
TARGET SELECTION:
Enter URLs, filenames or nmap-format IP ranges.
Use /dev/stdin to pipe HTML directly
--input-file=FILE, -i Identify URLs found in FILE, eg. -i /dev/stdin
--url-prefix Add a prefix to target URLs
--url-suffix Add a suffix to target URLs
--url-pattern Insert the targets into a URL. Requires --input-file,
eg. www.example.com/%insert%/robots.txt
--example-urls, -e Add example URLs for each selected plugin to the target
list. By default will add example URLs for all plugins.
AGGRESSION LEVELS:
--aggression, -a=LEVEL The aggression level controls the trade-off between
speed/stealth and reliability. Default: 1
Aggression levels are:
1 (Passive) Make one HTTP request per target. Except for redirects.
2 (Polite) Reserved for future use
3 (Aggressive) Triggers aggressive plugin functions only when a
plugin matches passively.
4 (Heavy) Trigger aggressive functions for all plugins. Guess a
lot of URLs like Nikto.
HTTP OPTIONS:
--user-agent, -U=AGENT Identify as AGENT instead of WhatWeb/0.4.7.
--user, -u= HTTP basic authentication
--header, -H Add an HTTP header. eg "Foo:Bar". Specifying a default
header will replace it. Specifying an empty value, eg.
"User-Agent:" will remove the header.
--follow-redirect=WHEN Control when to follow redirects. WHEN may be `never',
`http-only', `meta-only', `same-site', `same-domain'
or `always'. Default: always
--max-redirects=NUM Maximum number of contiguous redirects. Default: 10
SPIDERING:
--recursion, -r Follow links recursively. Only follow links under the
path Default: off
--depth, -d Maximum recursion depth. Default: 10
--max-links, -m Maximum number of links to follow on one page
Default: 250
--spider-skip-extensions Redefine extensions to skip.
Default: zip,gz,tar,jpg,exe,png,pdf
PROXY:
--proxy <hostname[:port]> Set proxy hostname and port
Default: 8080
--proxy-user Set proxy user and password
PLUGINS:
--plugins, -p Comma delimited set of selected plugins. Default is all.
Each element can be a directory, file or plugin name and
can optionally have a modifier, eg. + or -
Examples: +/tmp/moo.rb,+/tmp/foo.rb
title,md5,+./plugins-disabled/
./plugins-disabled,-md5
-p + is a shortcut for -p +plugins-disabled
--list-plugins, -l List the plugins
--info-plugins, -I Display information for all plugins. Optionally search
with keywords in a comma delimited list.
--custom-plugin Define a custom plugin called Custom-Plugin,
Examples: ":text=>'powered by abc'"
":regexp=>/powered[ ]?by ab[0-9]/"
":ghdb=>'intitle:abc \"powered by abc\"'"
":md5=>'8666257030b94d3bdb46e05945f60b42'"
"{:text=>'powered by abc'},{:regexp=>/abc [ ]?1/i}"
LOGGING & OUTPUT:
--verbose, -v Increase verbosity, use twice for plugin development.
--colour,--color=WHEN control whether colour is used. WHEN may be `never',
`always', or `auto'
--quiet, -q Do not display brief logging to STDOUT
--log-brief=FILE Log brief, one-line output
--log-verbose=FILE Log verbose output
--log-xml=FILE Log XML format
--log-json=FILE Log JSON format
--log-json-verbose=FILE Log JSON Verbose format
--log-magictree=FILE Log MagicTree XML format
--log-object=FILE Log Ruby object inspection format
--log-mongo-database Name of the MongoDB database
--log-mongo-collection Name of the MongoDB collection. Default: whatweb
--log-mongo-host MongoDB hostname or IP address. Default: 0.0.0.0
--log-mongo-username MongoDB username. Default: nil
--log-mongo-password MongoDB password. Default: nil
--log-errors=FILE Log errors
PERFORMANCE & STABILITY:
--max-threads, -t Number of simultaneous threads. Default: 25.
--open-timeout Time in seconds. Default: 15
--read-timeout Time in seconds. Default: 30
--wait=SECONDS Wait SECONDS between connections
This is useful when using a single thread.
HELP & MISCELLANEOUS:
--help, -h This help
--debug Raise errors in plugins
--version Display version information. (WhatWeb 0.4.7)
EXAMPLE USAGE:
whatweb example.com
whatweb -v example.com
whatweb -a 3 example.com
whatweb 192.168.1.0/24
Changelog
- Added unit testing with rake @bcoles
- Added Elastic Search output @SlivTaMere
- Source code formatting cleanup @Code0x58
- Thread reuse and logging through a single thread @Code0x58
- Fixed max-redirection bug @Code0x58
- Fixed bug when using a proxy and HTTPS (unknown user)
- Fixed timeout deprecation warning @iGeek098
- New plugins and plugin updates @guikcd@bcoles@andreas-becker
- Added proxy and user-agent to logging @rdubourguais
- Updated Alexa top websites lists
- Updated update-alexa script
- Updated IP to Country database
- Updated man page
- Updated Mongo DB output for Mongo 2.x