I've been reading books on Red Teaming and one of the differences that stands out from Pentesting is the need to be stealthy.  Pentesting tools are very noisy and in a mature, or maybe even not so mature, environment, running stock Kali tools might set off an alert and trigger a ban of some sort.

So I was thinking -- if I wanted to get the WordPress version from a site in a stealthy manner, how would I go about doing that?  Let's paint that picture a bit more -- I'm on a network with my Kali laptop, I don't have access to the Internet, and I found a web server running WordPress.  I want to make as little noise as possible.  As it turns out, I know that I can get the WordPress version from wp-links-opml.php and I'll do it with Python because using a browser is lame.  :)

[ I've added a Scripts menu item at the top of the page where I'm going to store these for future use. ] 

This all started with WordPress:

PYTHON SCRIPT: RETRIEVE WORDPRESS VERSION

Then some time passed, I got bored one day, and I thought I'd see where I could find the version for Joomla.  Turns out Joomla has a README.txt file containing the information but it says Joomla! a bunch of times and the version scrolls past my eyes too quickly to catch it.  With a slight mod to the original script, I stop it from reading too many lines and I get what I want:

PYTHON SCRIPT: RETRIEVE JOOMLA VERSIONThe other day while playing with Drupal, I figured I'd round out this list with the three big content management systems but for some reason, the IF statement doesn't work like it does with Joomla and WordPress.  I don't know why it doesn't work, it should work as far as I can tell, but I just went about it a different way and I get what I want:

PYTHON SCRIPT: RETRIEVE DRUPAL VERSION

So let's state the obvious -- these files must exist.  If not, we can't retrieve the information.  I would assume anyone hardening their servers has removed them.  As far as I can tell, wp-links-opml.php has limited use and is the only one of the three that actually has a function other than giving away information.