WhatWeb v0.5.5 releases: Next generation web scanner

by do son · Published June 10, 2019 · Updated January 15, 2021

WhatWeb identifies websites. Its goal is to answer the question, “What is that Website?”. It recognizes 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 recognize 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 tradeoff 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 recognize a range of cues from subtle to obvious. For example, most WordPress websites can be identified by the meta HTML tag, e.g. ‘<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress 2.6.5″>’, 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 1800 plugins
Control the trade-off between speed/stealth and reliability
Performance Tuning. Control how many websites to scan concurrently.
Multiple log formats: Brief (greppable), Verbose (human readable), XML, JSON, MagicTree, RubyObject, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, SQL.
Proxy support including TOR
Custom HTTP headers
Basic HTTP authentication
Control over webpage redirection
IP address ranges
Fuzzy matching
Result certainty awareness
Custom plugins defined on the command line
IDN (International Domain Name) support

Changelog v.0.5.5

FIXES

#358 Fixed escape_for_sql method (@juananpe)

NEW PLUGINS

Apache Flink (@juananpe)

Dell-OpenManage-Switch-Administrator (@themaxdavitt)

FLIR AX8 (@urbanadventurer)

Huginn (@urbanadventurer)

OpenResty (@urbanadventurer)

Telerik UI (@definity)

Umbraco (@definity / @ChadBrigance

VMware Horizon (@themaxdavitt)

PLUGIN UPDATES

Joomla (@juananpe)

phpMyAdmin (@juananpe)

Microsoft IIS (@themaxdavitt)