Nuclei - Fast Vulnerability Scanner

Summary

Nuclei is one of the best and free open-source DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) tools.

11 min read

Nuclei

What is Nuclei?

Nuclei is used to send requests across targets based on a template, leading to zero false positives and providing fast scanning on a large number of hosts.

Nuclei offers scanning for a variety of protocols, including TCP, DNS, HTTP, SSL, File, Whois, Websocket, Headless etc. With powerful and flexible templating, Nuclei can be used to model all kinds of security checks.

Also, there are a lot of scan templates contributed by more than 300 security researchers and engineers.

Nuclei templates

How to install Nuclei?

Let’s get started. There are a few ways to get Nuclei on your machine:

 

Go:

				
					go install -v github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei/v2/cmd/nuclei@latest
				
			

Brew (macOS):

				
					brew install nuclei
				
			

Docker:

				
					docker pull projectdiscovery/nuclei:latest
				
			

Github:

				
					git clone https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei.git; \
cd nuclei/v2/cmd/nuclei; \
go build; \
mv nuclei /usr/local/bin/; \
nuclei -version;
				
			

Binary:

				
					## Download the latest binary for your OS and unzip to run the binary
https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei/releases
				
			

How to configure a Nuclei scan?

By default, all templates will get executed from the default template installation path.

				
					nuclei -u <Your target host>
## e.g. nuclei -u http://localhost:4000
				
			

to run scan with a custom template:

				
					nuclei -u <Target host> -t <Custom template path>
## e.g. nuclei -u http://localhost:4000 -t cves/
				
			

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One Response

  1. Hello, I have run this command “nuclei -u ” to test our website and now our website is not reachable anymore (on the internal network) do you have any suggestions why this happened?

    From external the website is working witouth a problem.

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