Nuclei

Why use it

Nuclei trades depth for speed and currency. Its community-driven template repository moves fast — new CVEs often have a Nuclei template within hours of public disclosure. Perfect for surface scanning and CVE confirmation.

What you get

• Thousands of community templates covering CVEs, misconfigurations, and exposures
• YAML-based templates anyone can write
• Parallel scanning at high concurrency
• JSON output that pipes cleanly into other tools
• Native targeting from a list of URLs/IPs

System requirements

Installation

go install -v github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei/v3/cmd/nuclei@latest if Go is installed, or grab a release binary from GitHub. Run nuclei -update-templates to pull the latest community pack. Then nuclei -u https://target.com for a quick scan.

Suggested configuration

Schedule a daily Nuclei run against your internet-facing assets via cron. Pipe JSON output to a file and diff against yesterday's — only alert on new findings. Use -severity critical,high to filter noise. Combine with a recon tool like Naabu or Subfinder to keep the target list automatic.

Integration ideas

• Pipe results into TheHive for triage
• Forward findings to Wazuh's logcollector for unified dashboarding
• Run after Subfinder/Naabu for automatic recon-to-scan

Alternatives

• OpenVAS — Broader coverage, slower, network-focused.
• Nessus Essentials — Better at OS-level CVEs, capped at 16 IPs.