Features

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

Plugins

Matches are made with:

• Text strings (case sensitive)
• Regular expressions
• Google Hack Database queries (limited set of keywords)
• MD5 hashes
• URL recognition
• HTML tag patterns
• Custom ruby code for passive and aggressive operations

To list the plugins supported:

$ ./whatweb -l

WhatWeb Plugin List

Plugin Name - Description
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1024-CMS - 1024 is one of a few CMS's leading the way with the implementation...
360-Web-Manager - 360-Web-Manager
3COM-NBX - 3COM NBX phone system. The NBX NetSet utility is a web interface i...
3dcart - 3dcart - The 3dcart Shopping Cart Software is a complete ecommerce s...
4D - 4D web application deployment server
4images - 4images is a powerful web-based image gallery management system. Fe...
... (truncated)

Search Plugins

To view more detail about a plugin or search plugins for a keyword:

$ ./whatweb -I phpBB

WhatWeb Detailed Plugin List
Searching for phpBB
================================================================================
Plugin:         phpBB
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Description:    phpBB is a free forum 
Website:        http://phpbb.org/

Author:         Andrew Horton
Version:        0.3

Features:       [Yes]  Pattern Matching (7)
                [Yes]  Version detection from pattern matching
                [Yes]  Function for passive matches
                [Yes]  Function for aggressive matches
                [Yes]  Google Dorks (1)

Google Dorks:
[1] "Powered by phpBB"
================================================================================

Plugin Selection

All plugins are loaded by default.

Plugins can be selected by directories, files or plugin names as a comma delimited list with the -p or --plugin command line option.

Each list item may have a modifier: + adds to the full set, - removes from the full set and no modifier overrides the defaults.

Examples

• --plugins +plugins-disabled,-foobar
• --plugins +/tmp/moo.rb
• --plugins foobar (only select foobar)
• -p title,md5,+./plugins-disabled/
• -p ./plugins-disabled,-md5

The --dorks command line option returns google dorks for the selected plugin. For example, --dorks wordpress returns "is proudly powered by WordPress"

The --grep, -g command line option searches the target page for the selected string and returns a match in a plugin called Grep if it is found.

Aggression

WhatWeb features several levels of aggression. By default the aggression level is set to 1 (stealthy) which sends a single HTTP GET request and also follows redirects.

--aggression, -a

  1. Stealthy Makes one HTTP request per target. Also follows redirects.
    2. Unused
    3. Aggressive Can make a handful of HTTP requests per target. This triggers
        aggressive plugins for targets only when those plugins are
        identified with a level 1 request first.
  4. Heavy  Makes a lot of HTTP requests per target. Aggressive tests from
        all plugins are used for all URLs.

Level 3 aggressive plugins will guess more URLs and perform actions that are potentially unsuitable without permission. WhatWeb currently does not support any intrusion/exploit level tests in plugins.

An example of the different results between level 1 and level 3:

A level 1, stealthy scan identifes that smartor.is-root.com/forum/ uses phpBB version 2:

$ ./whatweb smartor.is-root.com/forum/
http://smartor.is-root.com/forum/ [200] PasswordField[password], HTTPServer[Apache/2.2.15], PoweredBy[phpBB], Apache[2.2.15], IP[88.198.177.36], phpBB[2], PHP[5.2.13], X-Powered-By[PHP/5.2.13], Cookies[phpbb2mysql_data,phpbb2mysql_sid], Title[Smartors Mods Forums - Reloaded], Country[GERMANY][DE]

A level 3, aggressive scan triggers additional tests in the phpBB plugin which identifies that the website uses phpBB version 2.0.20 or higher:

$ ./whatweb -p plugins/phpbb.rb -a 3 smartor.is-root.com/forum/
http://smartor.is-root.com/forum/ [200] phpBB[2,>2.0.20]

Note the use of the -p argument to select only the phpBB plugin. It is advisable, but not mandatory, to select a specific plugin when attempting to fingerprint software versions in aggressive mode. This approach is far more stealthy as it will limit the number of requests.

WhatWeb has no caching so if you use aggressive plugins on redirecting URLs you may fetch the same files multiple times.