WhatWeb Scanner

Next generation web scanner that identifies websites and detects web technologies, CMS platforms, JavaScript libraries, web servers, and embedded devices.

Homepage: https://morningstarsecurity.com/research/whatweb

Usage

Basic scan:

enact run enact/scanner/whatweb:retrieve -a '{"url": "https://github.com"}'

Aggressive scan with verbose output:

enact run enact/scanner/whatweb:scan -a '{"url": "https://example.com", "aggression": 3, "verbose": true}'

Custom plugins and user agent:

enact run enact/scanner/whatweb -a '{"url": "https://example.com", "plugins": "title,md5,wordpress", "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0"}'

High-performance scan:

enact run enact/scanner/whatweb -a '{"url": "https://example.com", "no_cookies": true, "no_errors": true, "max_threads": 50}'

Aggression Levels

• 1 (Stealthy): Makes one HTTP request per target. Follows redirects. Default and recommended.
• 3 (Aggressive): If a level 1 plugin matches, additional requests are made for confirmation.
• 4 (Heavy): Makes many HTTP requests per target. All aggressive tests from all plugins are used.

What It Detects

WhatWeb recognizes hundreds of web technologies including:

• CMS platforms: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.
• Web frameworks: Rails, Django, Laravel, etc.
• JavaScript libraries: jQuery, React, Angular, etc.
• Web servers: Apache, Nginx, IIS, etc.
• Analytics tools: Google Analytics, etc.
• Programming languages: PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.
• CDNs: Cloudflare, Akamai, etc.

Parameters

• url (required): Target URL, hostname, or IP address
• aggression (default: 1): Controls speed/stealth vs reliability trade-off (1, 3, or 4)
• verbose (default: false): Include detailed plugin descriptions in output
• user_agent (default: ""): Custom User-Agent string for requests
• plugins (default: ""): Specific plugins to use (comma-separated, empty = all)
• no_errors (default: false): Suppress error messages for cleaner output
• max_threads (default: 25): Number of concurrent threads
• no_cookies (default: false): Disable cookie handling for better performance with high thread counts
• output_format (default: "json"): Return format - json or text

Example Output

{
  "target": "https://github.com",
  "http_status": 200,
  "plugins": {
    "HTTPServer": ["GitHub.com"],
    "Title": ["GitHub: Let's build from here"],
    "HTML5": {},
    "Script": ["application/json", "text/javascript"]
  }
}