How to Install and Use Nuclei: A New Wave in Vulnerability Scanning 🚀

Saturday, Jan 11, 2025 | 7 minute read

GitHub Trend

Unleash the Future of Cybersecurity! 🚀 This cutting-edge vulnerability scanning tool boasts high performance and flexibility, empowering users to create custom templates effortlessly. With support for various protocols and seamless CI/CD integration, it’s perfect for diverse security needs! 🛡️

Nuclei: A New Wave in Vulnerability Scanning 🛡️

“In today’s increasingly severe cybersecurity landscape, the importance of vulnerability scanning tools is becoming ever more pronounced.” 🌍✨ As cyber attack methods continue to evolve, organizations are facing progressively complex security challenges. To tackle these threats, businesses need efficient, flexible, and reliable tools to safeguard their digital assets. This is where Nuclei comes into play, emerging as a shining gem in the field of cybersecurity! Nuclei is a modern, high-performance vulnerability scanning tool dedicated to providing users with a simple yet effective way to detect vulnerabilities. By utilizing YAML templates, users can effortlessly create custom vulnerability detection scenarios, giving a powerful boost to our cybersecurity efforts! 💪

1. The Revolutionary Definition of Nuclei: A High-Performance Vulnerability Scanning Tool 🚀

With its efficient design philosophy, Nuclei has become one of the most popular vulnerability scanning tools available today! Its main strength lies in its ability to simulate real environments, significantly reducing false positive rates and improving the accuracy of vulnerability detection. This means that users can rely more on Nuclei to identify potential security risks without worrying about false alarms! 🎯

2. The Unique Appeal of Nuclei: Breaking Down Traditional Barriers in Vulnerability Detection 🔧

Nuclei’s flexibility comes from its template customization capability, allowing users to create and adjust vulnerability templates based on specific needs. This freedom enables every team to design their own comprehensive detection solutions! Moreover, Nuclei offers fast concurrent scanning capabilities, greatly enhancing scanning efficiency through clustered requests and significantly shortening the timeliness of detection projects.

Nuclei supports various network protocols 🌐, including TCP, DNS, HTTP, SSL, and WHOIS, among others. This wide protocol applicability allows Nuclei to cater to different professional fields, whether in corporate, educational, or financial sectors, everyone can find its utility. Additionally, the rich template library contributed by the community, stemming from the involvement of thousands of security experts worldwide, ensures that Nuclei can timely adapt to emerging vulnerability threats! 🛠️

3. Why Developers are Drawn to Nuclei: The Appeal Explained 💡

Nuclei is not just powerful; it also integrates seamlessly with CI/CD processes. This integration allows for a smoother flow of vulnerability assessments and regression tests, fostering collaboration between development and security teams. Furthermore, Nuclei boasts efficient workflow management and tool integration capabilities, allowing it to work alongside popular tools such as Jira, Splunk, and GitHub, enhancing overall team productivity.

In terms of user base, Nuclei also demonstrates broad applicability. Whether you are a security engineer, a red team member, a DevOps team member, or a penetration tester, you can find the support you need within Nuclei. This diversity in application scenarios provides a perfect solution for a wide range of security needs!

Nuclei is leading a new trend in vulnerability scanning, with its flexibility and robust features making it the ideal choice for security professionals. In an era where cybersecurity awareness is on the rise, mastering Nuclei and utilizing it for professional vulnerability scanning will help organizations effectively safeguard their digital asset security! 🌐

How to Install Nuclei 🚀

Installing Nuclei is actually super simple, especially with the Go language package manager. For beginners, just follow these straightforward steps:

Enter the following command in the terminal:

go install -v github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei/v3/cmd/nuclei@latest

• This command enables the Go tool to download and install Nuclei from the specified GitHub repository.
• go install is a Go command used for installing Go packages, making the process easy and convenient.
• The -v option will display more detailed information during the installation process, providing feedback on your installation progress.
• github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei/v3/cmd/nuclei@latest is the address and version information for the Nuclei package.

Once the installation is complete, you can confirm it by typing nuclei in your terminal. If successful, you will see the Nuclei version information and some basic usage hints!

Using Nuclei 🔍

Knowing how to use Nuclei is key to ensuring your cybersecurity efforts are successful. Let’s start with the most basic operations!

Show All Command Line Parameters 📜

You can enter the following command to see all command line parameters supported by Nuclei:

nuclei -h

• This command will output help information, including all available options and usage instructions, assisting you in better understanding how to use Nuclei.

Common Command Line Examples ⚙️

Next, let’s demonstrate how to use Nuclei for various types of scans through a few specific commands.

Scanning a Single Target 🏢

If you want to scan a specific domain, such as example.com, you can run:

nuclei -target example.com

• The -target followed by the URL specifies that Nuclei will search for potential vulnerabilities on that domain.

Scanning Multiple Targets 📂

If you have multiple targets to scan, you can place them in a text file with one target per line, then use:

nuclei -list hosts.txt

• The -list option allows you to provide a file, which means Nuclei will automatically read the targets from that file for scanning, making it more efficient!

Network Scanning 🌐

Want to scan an entire subnet? Just use a subnet address in CIDR format, like:

nuclei -target 192.168.1.0/24

• 192.168.1.0/24 refers to the entire subnet, and Nuclei will scan all devices within this subnet, very convenient!

Using Custom Templates 📝

If you have your own templates and want to perform scans based on specific detection criteria, you can run:

nuclei -u https://example.com -t /path/to/your-template.yaml

• Here, the -t parameter allows you to specify a path to a .yaml file that contains your custom template for executing specific vulnerability detections.

Connecting to ProjectDiscovery ☁️

For further analysis and remediation convenience, you can also upload scan results to a cloud platform. Just use the following command:

nuclei -target https://example.com -dashboard

• The -dashboard parameter enables cloud functionality, allowing you to track and manage scan results, keeping everything more organized!

Using Nuclei Templates 🗂️

Nuclei not only supports custom templates but also comes with many community templates for quick vulnerability scanning! To use the default templates for scanning, just run the following command:

nuclei -u https://example.com

• This will scan the specified URL using Nuclei’s default templates, making it highly efficient!

Using Template Workflows 🔄

Utilizing workflow features allows you to combine the execution of multiple templates, which is super convenient! Refer to the following commands:

nuclei -u https://example.com -w workflows/
nuclei -list http_urls.txt -w workflows/wordpress-workflow.yaml

• The -w parameter enables you to specify workflow files or directories for scanning, making this functionality highly flexible and extensible!

Copyrighted Templates 📃

To maintain the templates’ latest status, you can always run the following command to automatically update all templates:

nuclei -update-templates

• This command will check for the latest templates on the community server and update your local template library, ensuring you can use the latest detection standards!

Additional Example: Docker Usage 🐳

If you prefer a containerized environment, you can use Docker to run Nuclei. For example:

docker run --rm projectdiscovery/nuclei -u google.com -jsonl

• This command runs Nuclei inside a Docker container to scan google.com, supporting output in JSONL format, making subsequent processing easier!

For more customization, you can use volume mounting:

docker run --rm -v ./:/app/ projectdiscovery/nuclei -l /app/urls.txt -jsonl /app/results.jsonl

• Here, the current directory is mounted to the /app/ directory of the Docker container, allowing you to save a set of targets into a urls.txt file and output results to results.jsonl, extremely convenient!

Custom Template Example 🌟

Here is a simple custom template example that you can refer to in order to create your own templates:

id: example-template
info:
  name: Example Vulnerability
  severity: critical
  description: This template checks for an example vulnerability.
requests:
  - method: GET
    path:
      - "{{BaseURL}}/example/path"
    headers:
      User-Agent: nuclei
    matchers:
      - type: word
        words:
          - "vulnerable"

• Here, id is the unique identifier of the template, and info contains the name, severity, and description of the template so that you clearly understand its content.
• Under requests, the way to initiate requests is defined, including the HTTP method, request path, etc., with {{BaseURL}} being a dynamic substitution variable that will be replaced by the target URL at runtime.
• Lastly, matchers define the rules for matching specific content in the response, which can be used to detect whether the target application has specific security vulnerabilities.

We hope that through this introduction, you can successfully install and use Nuclei for vulnerability scanning and enjoy the security and convenience that cybersecurity enables! 🎉