secator is a Python-based task and workflow runner that unifies dozens of well-known reconnaissance and vulnerability scanning tools under a single CLI, built for authorized penetration testers and security researchers.
| Tool | freelabz/secator — a task and workflow runner for security assessments integrating dozens of popular tools |
| Category | Security automation / orchestration framework (Python) |
| Primary Use | Running and chaining tools like nmap, httpx, nuclei, and subfinder with unified inputs and output schemas during authorized assessments |
| Safe Use | Intended for penetration testers and security researchers working within explicitly authorized engagements, lab environments, and internal security audits |
| Telemetry Note | Because secator wraps well-known scanners, its activity appears on the wire as the underlying tools (nmap SYN probes, ffuf fuzzing patterns, nuclei template signatures), making it fully observable by IDS/WAF monitoring on in-scope assets |
secator, hosted at freelabz/secator, describes itself as "the pentester's swiss knife," and the tagline is accurate in a narrow, technical sense: it is not a scanner itself but a task and workflow runner that sits above dozens of established security tools. The README positions it squarely as a productivity layer for pentesters and security researchers, taking the fragmentation that plagues assessment work — a Go binary here, a Python script there, incompatible output formats everywhere — and imposing a single orchestration model on top. With over 1,300 stars and an active release cadence tracked through GitHub badges, it has clearly resonated with practitioners who live in the terminal during authorized engagements.
The feature list in the README is short but architecturally revealing. secator offers a curated list of commands, unified input options, a unified output schema, both CLI and library usage, distributed execution via Celery, and a progression from simple tasks to complex workflows. Each of these points addresses a concrete pain point. Curated commands mean the maintainers have pre-wrapped each integrated tool with sane defaults and normalized flag mappings. Unified input and output schemas mean you can pipe the JSON from one tool into the next without writing ad-hoc jq glue between them. The Celery option hints at horizontal scaling for large-scope internal assessments where a single workstation cannot chew through a /16 in a reasonable window.
The supported tools table is the heart of the README, and it reads like a cross-section of the modern offensive-security toolchain. On the network side, secator integrates nmap, naabu for fast port scanning, fping and arpscan for host discovery, mapcidr for CIDR manipulation, and getasn for ASN enrichment. On the web side, it wraps httpx for HTTP probing, ffuf, feroxbuster, and dirsearch for content discovery, dalfox for XSS testing, arjun and x8 for hidden parameter discovery, bup for 40X bypass checks, and katana, gospider, and cariddi for crawling.
Reconnaissance and OSINT coverage is equally broad. subfinder and dnsx handle passive subdomain and DNS work, gau and xurlfind3r pull known URLs from sources like the Wayback Machine and AlienVault's Open Threat Exchange, maigret builds username dossiers, h8mail does email lookups, and jswhois and whois provide registration data. Each tool carries a category tag in the table — url/fuzz, dns/recon, user/recon/username, and so on — which suggests secator uses these categories internally to reason about how outputs from one class of tool can feed inputs to another.
Vulnerability detection is handled through heavyweight integrations: nuclei with its YAML-based template DSL, trivy and grype for container and filesystem scanning, search_vulns and searchsploit for matching products against known CVEs and ExploitDB entries, plus WordPress-specific tooling in wpscan and wpprobe. Secret detection is covered by gitleaks and trufflehog, and configuration auditing by testssl for TLS flaws and sshaudit for SSH key-exchange and cipher hygiene. Notably, the table also includes msfconsole under an exploit/attack category — an integration that reinforces how important scope discipline is with this tool, since it can chain directly into offensive exploitation within an engagement.
The category taxonomy deserves attention because it is the clearest window into the tool's internal architecture. Tags like ip/recon, url/probe, pattern/scan, and vuln/scan imply that secator understands the semantic type of each tool's input and output. That is what makes workflows viable: a workflow can plausibly take a domain, run subfinder, feed resolved hosts into httpx, push live URLs into katana and then nuclei, all without the operator hand-transforming data at each hop. The README does not spell out the workflow DSL in detail — that lives in the documentation site at docs.freelabz.com — but the structure is clearly designed around typed data flow rather than raw shell piping.
Extensibility is addressed explicitly. The maintainers invite requests for new tool integrations via GitHub issues, subject to selection criteria, and point to a developer guide at docs.freelabz.com/for-developers/writing-custom-tasks for wrapping your own tooling as custom tasks. This matters in practice because every assessment team has one or two internal scripts that never appear in public tool lists, and a runner that cannot absorb them tends to get abandoned halfway through an engagement. The fact that secator treats task definitions as pluggable units rather than a closed list is a strong signal of long-term usability.
Installation is straightforward for a tool that wraps so many dependencies. The README offers a universal install script fetched over curl from the repository, and PyPI badges indicate pip install secator as the canonical distribution channel with published releases. Python 3.6+ is the stated baseline, and the license is BSL 1.1 — worth noting for teams with commercial-use policies, since Boost Software License terms are permissive but should still clear legal review in enterprise contexts.
From a defensive perspective, secator is best understood as an amplification layer over tools defenders already monitor. Its wrapped scanners produce the same network signatures as the originals: nmap SYN patterns, ffuf request-rate anomalies, nuclei template fingerprints in user agents and request bodies. What changes is coordination and volume — a workflow runner can chain stages with machine-speed consistency, so blue teams watching large IP spaces should expect bursty, structured scanning patterns rather than scattered manual activity. On assets you own, that same visibility makes secator useful for continuous internal attack-surface validation.
The honest assessment is that secator competes in a crowded space — bbot, which it also integrates, is itself a multipurpose scanner with workflow ambitions — and its differentiation lies in breadth of integration and the Celery-backed distributed option rather than novel detection capability. For authorized professionals, its value proposition is real: less glue code, normalized output, and a path from ad-hoc tool invocations to repeatable, documentable workflows. As with any orchestration layer that includes exploit/attack category tools, the operator bears full responsibility for scope boundaries, but within a signed engagement, secator is a legitimate and thoughtfully designed productivity instrument.
freelabz/secator.Educational analysis for authorized security professionals. Use only in controlled, authorized environments.
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