Meg – Hacker Tools: Endpoint scan the masses! 👩‍💻

You’ve just enumerated all the subdomains of your target and what? There’s 400 of them? Are you going to start individual scans to find endpoints on them? No you’re not! You’re going to use Meg, of course!

🙋‍♂️ What is Meg?

Meg is not the girl nextdoor, no it’s an amazing tool you need to know about! As more and more people get into bug bounty, more and more scans are being launched and some servers are just not ready for them. We want to scan a ton of endpoints, but we want the server to stay responsive, so that we can continue scanning.

Tomnomnom has come up with the brilliant idea of not just scanning our targets one-by-one, but distributing traffic between them. Instead of barraging a single target with 100 requests per second, we send 1 request to 100 targets per second. This way, everyone can keep up and we still receive the same amount of results!

👷‍♀️ Installing Meg

Installing Meg couldn’t be easier! Just follow these steps

• Go to the releases page on GitHub

• Download the binary for your architecture

• Run tar -zxvf binary.tgz to extract it

• Enjoy!

🐱‍🏍 Our first run!

Let’s get into it! Let’s finally start using Meg!

The things you need in order to run Meg are:

• A wordlist of endpoints you want to scan. SecLists is a great place to get started.

• A list of targets to scan. In this case, I’ll take some intigriti subdomains, however you will probably want to take the output from another discovery tool!

Now we’re really ready to go! I’ll run meg --verbose wordlist hosts.txt Note that I’m using the --verbose flag here just to make what the tool is doing visible. This is of course not needed. Let’s assess the command line output of the tool!

Meg output

The output here shows the location where it has stored the result of the request, then the endpoint and then the status code. We can see here how it sends the same request to each endpoint and gathers it’s response. This is how the load for the server is greatly decreased!

Now, without the --verbose option, the tool doesn’t print out this information, but it saves it to out/index (output directory can be changed). From there you can simply use grep to get all the results for specific targets as shown here

Meg index grepping

You can also see the responses for these requests by just looking in the files for them, an example of which is shown below

Meg showing output file

🌟 Features

You may have seen some things you don’t really fancy in the results shown before. Perhaps you only want to capture 200 OK responses or you want to send HEAD requests instead of GET requests. All of that is of course possible. Let’s discuss Meg’s --help page!

Meg –help

• -c or --concurrency: This option can be used to change the concurrency level. Higher numbers here mean more requests being sent out at once.

• -d or --delay: This option relates to the delay between every request to the same host in milliseconds. This tool is made to be slower to the server, however, in certain configurations, it can still be too fast. Luckily the default here is already 5 seconds.

• -H or --header: Need to set a specific header for each request, worry no more and set this option!

• -L or --location: Getting a lot of 302’s? Use this option to follow those redirects!

• -s or --savestatus: Only save responses with specific status codes.

• -t or --timeout: Failing requests will timeout after this amount of milliseconds. The default is 10000.

• -v or --verbose: If you need some more output, then this option is for you!

• -X or --method: Change the request method from GET to for example HEAD. I highly recommend playing around with sending HEAD requests!

🚧 Conclusion

Meg is a simple, yet helpful tool designed to help you get more efficient and to go easier on your targets! Start using it today to hack even more efficiently!

If you would like to recommend a tool for us to cover next week, then be sure to let us know down below. Also be sure to check out all the previous Hacker Tools articles, such as the last one on EyeWitness.

Did you know that there is a video accompanying this article? Check out the playlist!