SecureState released a new auxiliary module for the Metasploit Framework that can reduce the amount of time that it takes to visually fingerprint large amounts of web servers.

During penetration tests, consultants often need to target web applications in order to find “low hanging” vulnerabilities, such as default password configurations and out of date software. This task can be very difficult on large networks that are home to many hosts with different web servers, often running on a variety of ports.

In this situation, penetration testers must often resort to running port scans and opening potential web servers in a browser one by one. This is a very time consuming and tedious task.

The new module, called "page_collector," takes a range of hosts in the typical RHOSTS fashion and checks a user-definable list of ports for web services using both HTTP and HTTPS. Each successfully identified web server then gets a corresponding iFrame in an output file.

The result is a single HTML document that, when loaded by the attacker, presents them with an easy to view list of hosts.

Using this, penetration testers can reduce the overhead usually required to find such “low hanging fruit” as Tomcat and JBoss installations, as well as generic login pages.