For many security professionals, the command line isn’t just a tool—it’s home. It’s where automation lives, where investigations take shape, and where scripts connect dozens of moving parts into a single flow. To meet users where they are, we’re excited to release the Censys CLI.
The Power of Censys, Now on the Command Line
The new Censys CLI provides analysts and researchers with a direct, intuitive way to interact with Censys data. We’ve designed it to integrate seamlessly with the new free lookup API endpoints we recently released, making programmatic access to our data available to everyone.
This tool is a powerful extension of the Censys Platform, simplifying complex tasks and putting the insights you need just a few keystrokes away so that you can perform investigations without ever leaving your terminal.
Key Features
We focused on creating intuitive commands that enable quick access to Internet intelligence:
- view: Look up hosts, certificates, or web properties effortlessly. The CLI can infer the asset type from your input, whether it’s an IP address, domain, or certificate ID. For quick triage, use the -s flag to get a simplified response with key details like last scan time, location, and a list of open ports and protocols.
- search: Run queries across all Censys datasets with the same power and functionality you’ve come to expect from the Censys Platform API. You can even narrow your search to a specific Censys collection.
- aggregate: Instead of just a list of search results, this command provides a summary report, helping you identify and group search results to spot trends and patterns at a glance.
- censeye: A command for our Threat Hunting customers that enables you to identify related web assets based on specific field-value pairs; allowing you to map out interconnected infrastructure and follow the trail of an investigation.
- history: Understand how assets change over time by viewing historical data for hosts and certificates.
More Power for Censys Customers
For our paid users, the Censys CLI offers an expanded toolkit with access to additional investigative commands that leverage additional APIs and data access. This ensures that the CLI scales with your needs, providing advanced capabilities for threat hunting, and more.
Built for the Way You Work
We know a good CLI is about more than just commands; it needs to integrate into existing scripts and automation pipelines. That’s why our tool:
- Accepts input via command-line flags, files, and even stdin
- Supports JSON and YAML output modes
Get Started Today
Censys isn’t just building for the enterprise – we’re building with the community. Security professionals, students, researchers, and hobbyists all deserve powerful tools to understand the internet. The CLI is an open door to the Censys Internet Map, right where you work.
Download the CLI today and bring Censys to your terminal. Build. Lookup. Explore.
