Skipfish Security Scanner for Web Apps
Google's online security teams has come out with a free security scanner for web apps, named Skipfish.
The command line tool acts as Web crawler and prepares an interactive sitemap for the targeted site. The Web app is then subjected to a number of nondisruptive security probes, such as for cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (XSRF) and server-side SQL injection. The software can probe websites developed under multiple technologies and frameworks.
Skipfish is written in C and, according to its developers, shows great performance: Internet requests can produce over 500 responses per second, LAN/MAN requests over 2,000 responses and local requests over 7,000 responses per second. The developers implemented a custom HTTP stack for Skipfish.
The Skipfish developers indicate that their tool digs up many relevant security vulnerabilities, but not all. As with many security scanners, permission to test the website is the prerequisite, unless you own it outright.
Skipfish is open source software under Apache 2.0 licensing. The Google Code site has its own Skipfish page, with downloads of a source tarball and online documentation.
Issue 210/2018
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News
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Released
The latest release is focused on hybrid cloud.
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Microsoft Releases a Linux-Based OS
The company is building a new IoT environment powered by Linux.
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Solomon Hykes Leaves Docker
In a surprise move, Solomon Hykes, the creator of Docker has left the company.
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Red Hat Celebrates 25th Anniversary with a New Code Portal
The company announces a GitHub page with links to source code for all its projects
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Gnome 3.28 Released
The latest GNOME rolls out with better contact management and new features for handling virtual machines.
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Install Firefox in a Snap on Linux
Mozilla has picked the Snap package system to deliver its application to Linux users.
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OpenStack Queens Released
The new release comes with new features for mission critical workloads.
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Kali Linux Comes to Windows
The Kali Linux developers even managed to run full blown XFCE desktop via WSL.
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Ubuntu to Start Collecting Some Data with Ubuntu 18.04
It will be an ‘opt-out’ feature.
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CNCF Illuminates Serverless Vision
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation announces a paper describing their model for a serverless ecosystem.