Detectify Introduces an Open Source Security Tool for Ethical Hackers

Ugly Duckling, a stand-alone application security tool specially designed for ethical hackers to make it easier for them to share their discoveries, is now available from Detectify, the SaaS security company powered by ethical hackers.

To keep on top of web application security, it's important to find web vulnerabilities as soon as they appear - before attackers exploit them. By offering ethical hackers the tools to build further test modules independently, Ugly Duckling speeds up the integration of vulnerabilities discovered by ethical hackers into automatic security tests on Detectify's platform.

When an ethical hacker discovers a loophole, he or she will create a module as a JSON file and test it in Ugly Duckling to ensure that it works. The JSON file is then implemented on Detectify's platform, allowing thousands of app owners and security teams to access the quality-checked findings. Vulnerability reports submitted to Ugly Duckling can be run live as security checks within 5-10 minutes of submission. It's a win-win situation: security and engineering teams can keep up with the latest exploitable vulnerabilities discovered in the wild, while ethical hackers can get paid more quickly.

To define the vulnerabilities, Ugly Duckling uses a custom JSON-based template format. It detects "stateless" vulnerabilities, i.e., vulnerabilities that can be discovered by analyzing the response to a single HTTP request.

Detectify crowdsources the most latest security research from ethical hackers and distributes it as payload-based tests to security engineers and application owners, allowing them to regularly check their applications for vulnerabilities.

On Github, you can find the Ugly Duckling vulnerability scanning tool, which is open-source and MIT-licensed. The Ugly Duckling web scanner is not limited to ethical hackers in Detectify's Crowdsourced network, but is open for all to use for bug bounty hunting, security research, or penetration testing, in keeping with the company's belief in a collective approach to security.

About Detectify


Detectify believes that everybody should have access to world-class cybersecurity knowledge. Detectify automates the most latest security findings from the world's top ethical hackers and delivers them to security defenders and web application teams. Detectify's security tools, which are driven by a network of hand-picked ethical hackers, check your application outside the OWASP Top 10 and help you keep on top of cloud threats.