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What is WhatWeb?

WhatWeb identifies websites. Its goal is to answer the question, "What is that Website?". WhatWeb recognises web technologies including content management systems (CMS), blogging platforms, statistic/analytics packages, JavaScript libraries, web servers, and embedded devices. WhatWeb has over 1700 plugins, each to recognise something different. WhatWeb also identifies version numbers, email addresses, account IDs, web framework modules, SQL errors, and more.

WhatWeb can be stealthy and fast, or thorough but slow. WhatWeb supports an aggression level to control the trade off between speed and reliability. When you visit a website in your browser, the transaction includes many hints of what web technologies are powering that website. Sometimes a single webpage visit contains enough information to identify a website but when it does not, WhatWeb can interrogate the website further. The default level of aggression, called 'stealthy', is the fastest and requires only one HTTP request of a website. This is suitable for scanning public websites. More aggressive modes were developed for use in penetration tests.

Most WhatWeb plugins are thorough and recognise a range of cues from subtle to obvious. For example, most WordPress websites can be identified by the meta HTML tag, e.g. '', but a minority of WordPress websites remove this identifying tag but this does not thwart WhatWeb. The WordPress WhatWeb plugin has over 15 tests, which include checking the favicon, default installation files, login pages, and checking for "/wp-content/" within relative links.


"Seems like this is an application that needs a permanent place in your tool arsenal." PenTestIT.com

"With stealth-mode turned all the way up to 11 it's less intrusive than the Google crawler and eminently suitable for large scale internet scanning." VulnerabilityAssessment.co.uk

"The tool WhatWeb needs to be added to any pen tester’s arsenal." blog.tevora.com

"[BlindElephant and WhatWeb] are handy tools for web site owners, penetration testers and vulnerability testing." HackerTarget.com

News

September 2017

June 2016

  • Lots has been happening and WhatWeb is still in active development. Check the ChangeLog.

November 2011

  • Project milestone : 1,500 plugins!

July 2011

April 2011

March 2011

February 2011

December 2010

November 2010

  • WhatWeb's first birthday! One year since WhatWeb 0.3 was released on November 2nd 2009 at Kiwicon III.
  • WhatWeb has been integrated into BackBox
  • WhatWeb added to the Rochester Institute of Technology SPARSA Wiki (Security Practices and Research Student Association)
  • WhatWeb and BlindElephant were featured in the How Does Your Gut Stack Up presentation at Kiwicon4.
    • How Does Your Gut Stack Up - no videos - 6,890 KB
    • How Does Your Gut Stack Up - slides+videos - Low Quality NSV - 14,452 KB
    • How Does Your Gut Stack Up - slides+videos - High Quality AVI - ~115MB

October 2010

September 2010

August 2010

July 2010

June 2010

May 2010

April 2010

March 2010

November 2009

Development