Photon is a lightning fast web crawler which extracts URLs, files, intel & endpoints from a target.
Yep, I am using 100 threads and Photon won't complain about it because its in Ninja Mode 😎
Crawlers are supposed to recursively extract links right? Well that's kind of boring so Photon goes beyond that. It extracts the following information:
- URLs (in-scope & out-of-scope)
- URLs with parameters (
example.com/gallery.php?id=2) - Intel (emails, social media accounts, amazon buckets etc.)
- Files (pdf, png, xml etc.)
- JavaScript files & Endpoints present in them
The extracted information is saved in an organized manner.
Here's a secret, most of the tools floating on the internet aren't properly multi-threaded even if they are supposed to. They either supply a list of items to threads which results in multiple threads accessing the same item or they simply put a thread lock and end up rendering multi-threading useless.
But Photon is different or should I say "genius"? Take a look at this and decide yourself.
In Ninja Mode, 3 online services are used to make requests to the target on your behalf.
So basically, now you have 4 clients making requests to the same server simultaneously which gives you a speed boost, minimizes the risk of connection reset as well as delays requests from a single client.
Here's a comparison generated by Quark where the lines represent threads:
Specifies the URL to crawl.
python photon.py -u http://example.com
If you feel like the crawling is taking too long or you just don't want to crawl anymore, just press ctrl + c in your terminal and Photon will skip the rest of URLs.
It specifies how much deeper should photon crawl.
python photon.py -u http://example.com -l 3
Default Value: 2
It specifies the delay between requests.
python photon.py -u http://example.com -d 1
Default Value: 0
The number of threads to use.
python photon.py -u http://example.com -t 10
Default Value: 2
Note: The optimal number of threads depends on your connection speed as well as nature of the target server. If you have a decent network connection and the server doesn't have any rate limiting in place, you can use up to 100 threads.
Cookie to send.
python photon.py -u http://example.com -c "PHPSSID=821b32d21"
Toggles Ninja Mode on/off.
python photon.py -u http://example.com --ninja
Default Value: False
Lets you add custom seeds, seperated by commas.
python photon -u http://example.com -s "http://example.com/portals.html,http://example.com/blog/2018"
Apart from reporting bugs and stuff, please help me add more "APIs" to make the Ninja Mode more powerful and decrease the load on those poor servers.
Photon is licensed under GPL v3.0 license.