1. When we start finding vulnerabilities in a web application,either we have a option to do it manually by putting in hours of patience and grilling or we generally hear the commonly used tools like Acunetix and few other online scanners...or for may be afford a luxury like IBM - Proventia Network Enterprise Scanner ..but there is an open source tool option to Acunetix. Takes lil bit of time but the amount of options that it offers are huge...and gives a great report that is exhaustive.
2. Arachni is an Open Source, feature-full, modular, high-performance Ruby framework aimed towards helping penetration testers and administrators evaluate the security of web applications. It is smart, it trains itself by learning from the HTTP responses it receives during the audit process and is able to perform meta-analysis using a number of factors in order to correctly assess the trustworthiness of results and intelligently identify false-positives. It is versatile enough to cover a great deal of use cases, ranging from a simple command line scanner utility, to a global high performance grid of scanners, to a Ruby library allowing for scripted audits, to a multi-user multi-scan web collaboration platform.
3. Arachni is a fully automated system which tries to enforce the fire and forget principle. As soon as a scan is started it will not bother you for anything nor require further user interaction.Upon completion, you will be able to export the scan results to several different formats (HTML, Plain Text, XML, etc.).Few useful pointers about details of this good scanner :
Download from - http://www.arachni-scanner.com/download/
Homepage - http://arachni-scanner.com
Documentation - https://github.com/Arachni/arachni/wiki
Support - http://support.arachni-scanner.com
GitHub page - http://github.com/Arachni/arachni
Code Documentation - http://rubydoc.info/github/Arachni/arachni
Author - Tasos "Zapotek" Laskos (http://twitter.com/Zap0tek)
Twitter - http://twitter.com/ArachniScanner
4. To use Arachni run the executables under "bin/".
To launch the Web interface:
cd bin
./arachni_web in a separate terminal
and ./arachni_rpcd in a separate terminal
Default account details:
Administrator:
E-mail address: admin@admin.admin
Password: administrator
User:
E-mail address: user@user.user
Password: regular_user
5. For a quick scan: via the command-line interface:
bin/arachni http://test.com
6. For detailed documentation see: http://arachni-scanner.com/wiki/User-guide