Nikto
Nikto web server security scanner bot
About this crawler
Nikto is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern Nikto in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as scanner. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block Nikto traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.
Block-rate · top 25k sites
0.33%
Technical details
- Name
- Nikto
- Pattern
Nikto- Tags
- scanner
- Reference
- http://cirt.net/nikto/
- Added
- 2026/04/07
- rDNS suffixes
.cirt.net,.nikto.pl- Instances
- 2 known sample(s)
rDNS verification (FCrDNS)
Verify a request is genuinely Nikto with forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the client IP's PTR record must end in one of the suffixes below and a forward A/AAAA lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. UA strings alone are spoofable; FCrDNS is not.
.cirt.net.nikto.pl
Sample User-Agent strings
Mozilla/5.00 (Nikto/2.1.5) (Evasions:None) (Test:Port Check)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) Nikto/2.5.0 (Evasions:None) (Test:Port Check)
Block this crawler
robots.txt — disallow Nikto:
User-agent: Nikto
Disallow: /
Apache .htaccess — return 403:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Nikto [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Nikto") {
return 403;
}
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