VEGA SCANNER : Powerful Open Source Web Application Vulnerability Scanner

1.   Vega is one free and open source scanner and testing platform to test the security of web applications by Subgraph, an open source security software company. Vega can help find and validate SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), inadvertently disclosed sensitive information, and other vulnerabilities. It is written in Java, GUI based, and runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows.Vega includes an automated scanner for quick tests and an intercepting proxy for tactical inspection. The Vega scanner finds XSS (cross-site scripting), SQL injection, and other vulnerabilities. 

Main Features:

    Automated Crawler and Vulnerability Scanner
    Consistent UI
    Website Crawler
    Intercepting Proxy
    SSL MITM
    Content Analysis
    Customizable alerts
    Database and Shared Data Model

2.   So to launch Vega in Kali Linux...go to Web Applications then to Web Vulnerability Scanners and select Vega. 

 Vega will flash an introduction banner and display a GUI

Vega has Scanner and Proxy tabs as u play with the interface as seen below. To use Vega as a Scanner,click on the Scanner tab , click on Scan on the top-left corner and select to start new scan

 You will see an input field asking for the target. The screen shot tested below is targeting www.thesecurityblogger.com. Choose target and click on Next:

3.   It takes time to scan but gives pretty exhaustive results and presents a summary too.

Skipfish : Web Application Security Reconnaissance@Kali Linux

1.   Skipfish is an active web application security reconnaissance tool. It prepares an interactive sitemap for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes. The resulting map is then annotated with the output from a number of active security checks. Skipfish is fast and easy to implement and can perform a robust scan of any website providing a lot of security tests, like php injection, XSS, format string vulnerabilities, overflow vulnerabilities, file inclusions and lot more categorized into high risk, medium risk and low risk issues. Skipfish also provides summary overviews of document types and issue types found; and an interactive sitemap, with nodes discovered through brute-force denoted in a distinctive way.

2.    The first thing that you should do is download the latest version of Skipfish here: http://code.google.com/p/skipfish/downloads/list

3.     The following screenshots show a stepped way to run and use this tool...

4.    As u download the file,you move to the terminal and cd to the place you have downloaded the file.Type the following command  to unzip the ,tgz file.

5.    There are pleothra command options available in Skipfish against a target website using a custom wordlist, enter skipfish, select your wordlist using the -W option followed by the location of the wordlist, select your output directory using -o followed by the location, and finally the target website.

Skipfish –o (output location) –S (location of wordlist) (target site)

The following example shows a scan using a wordlist called medium.wl on securityblogger.com. Skipfish will create a folder called Skipfishkaoutput on the desktop. This is run using the keyword skipfish, –o /root/Desktop/Skipfishkaoutput to specify the location to which send the output, -W /root/Desktop/medium.wl to specify the location of the dictionary and http://www.thesecuirtyblogger.com as the target to scan against.

So in the example that I take here,you need to type the following at the terminal :

It is also seen that the default Skipfish dictionaries will not run when using the –W command. You can copy a default wordlist and remove the read-only in the first line of the list (#ro) to run as a custom wordlist. This is shown in the following screen-shot:

Once the scan is complete or if you end it early, Skipfish will generate thousands of output files in the location specified when using the –o option to designate an output folder.To see the results, click on the index.html file, which will bring up an browser. You can click through the drop-down boxes to see your results.

The tool is pretty powerful indeed...can be gauged from the following screen shot of a news site that says that professional criminals used this tool to hack a financial site... :-)

XSS and CSS : Whats the difference ?

I often used to read XSS and CSS being read in the same context when i knew that CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets.There has been a lot of mixing up of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and cross site scripting. But actually when people are speaking of CSS in context of Cross site scripting what they actually mean is XSS only....its the same.....