CEWL - Web Content Discovery Tool - security Cheatsheets

Understanding CEWL for Web Content Discovery

CEWL (Custom Word List Generator) is a powerful command-line tool used for discovering web content and generating custom wordlists from websites. It's particularly useful for security professionals and penetration testers to gather potential usernames, passwords, or other relevant strings from a target's web presence. This tool crawls a given URL and extracts words found within the HTML, JavaScript, and other linked files.

Key CEWL Usage Examples and Options

Below are common ways to utilize CEWL, demonstrating its flexibility for various web content discovery tasks:

Basic Wordlist Generation

To spider a site and write all found words to a file:

cewl -w <file> <url>

Following External Links

To spider a site and follow links to other external sites:

cewl -o <url>

Custom User-Agent

To spider a site using a given user-agent string:

cewl -u <user-agent> <url>

Depth and Minimum Word Length

To spider a site for a given depth and minimum word length:

cewl -d <depth> -m <min word length> <url>

Word Count

To spider a site and include a count for each word found:

cewl -c <url>

Including Meta Data

To spider a site, including meta data, and separate the meta_data words into a specified file:

cewl -a -meta_file <file> <url>

Extracting Email Addresses

To spider a site and store discovered email addresses in a separate file:

cewl -e -email_file <file> <url>

Further Resources for Web Crawling and Security