How To Install Nikto Web Scanner on Ubuntu

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install the Nikto web scanner on Ubuntu. For those of you who didn’t know, Nikto Web-scanner is an open-source web-server scanner that can be used to scan the web-servers for malicious programs and files. Nikto can be used to scan the outdated versions of programs too. Nikto will provide us with a quick and easy scan to find out the dangerous files and programs in the server, At the end of the scan result in a log file.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Nikto Web Scanner on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Nikto Web Scanner on Ubuntu

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install wget unzip libnet-ssleay-perl libwhisker2-perl openssl

Step 2. Installing Nikto Web Scanner on Ubuntu system.

You can now easily install Nikto by running the following command below:

sudo apt install nikto

To check if Nikto is installed correctly and also its version, you can run the following command:

nikto

Step 4. Scan for vulnerabilities using Nikto.

Generally, Nikto requires just a host to scan which can be specified with -h or -host option for example if we need to scan a machine whose IP is 192.168.77.21 we will run Nikto as follows and the scan would look something like this:

nikto -h 192.168.77.21

If the webserver is running on a different port, you have to specify the port number by using -p or –port option:

nikto -h 192.168.77.21 -p 8080

To specify the target by its URL we will use a command:

nikto -h http:// www.your-domain.com

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Nikto. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Nikto web scanner on your Ubuntu 16.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Nikto website.