So you have decided to enter one of the most fascinating IT careers in the world – ethical hacking. Needless to mention, the responsibility of an ethical hacker is quite huge and only a professional who can think like a malicious hacker can succeed in this role. There are a number of challenges to deal with, like a data breach, malware, trojan, phishing attack, Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, Cross-site scripting, and so on. Evidently, an individual must possess specialized technical skills to succeed as an ethical hacker. Various training providers have started offering Ethical hacking for beginners courses to help professionals kickstart their careers in this challenging domain.
Today, the IT world is equipped with thousands of tools and frameworks that automate the traditional mundane tasks and enhance the operational efficiency of an organization. The same holds true for ethical hacking; there are a couple of handy tools that will make your life much easier. Such advanced tools help in identifying vulnerabilities and loopholes and fixing them before ill-intended hackers can exploit them.
This article describes some of the most popular ethical hacking tools that you must be aware of if you are an ethical hacker wannabe. Knowledge of such tools also puts you ahead of your peers and employers would give you preference over them.
Here goes the list!
Table of Contents
Nmap
Nmap or Network Mapper is one of the most popular ethical tools and is about to turn 25 years old in September 2022. It is a free and open-source platform for security auditing and network discovery. Linux Journal, Codetalker Digest, Info World, and LinuxQuestions.org termed Nmap as the “Security Product of the Year.” The tool supports several advanced techniques to map out networks filled with firewalls, IP filters, routers, and other obstacles. It uses raw IP packets in innovative ways to identify which hosts are available on the network, the services offered by those hosts, the OS on which they run, what kind of firewalls are in use, and many other characteristics.
Metasploit
Ethical hackers use Metasploit, the world’s most widely used penetration testing framework, to do more than just identify vulnerabilities, handle security assessments, and improve security awareness. The tool allows them to always stay a step ahead of the game. Whether you want to gather information, gain access, maintain persistence, or lastly escape detection, Metasploit automates various repetitive tasks involved in penetration testing. The framework includes a host of features like a long list of auxiliary modules, a fuzzer to identify potential security flaws, is modular, easily extensible, and enjoys an active community.
Hashcat
As mentioned on the official website, Hashcat is the world’s fastest and most advanced password recovery tool. The tool is released as open-source software under the MIT License. It is a versatile and efficient hacking tool that assists brute-force attacks by conducting them with hash values of passwords guessed by the tool. Apart from brute-force attempts, Hashcat can use dictionary attacks, mask attacks, combinator attacks, as well as rule-based attacks to guess the password. Such techniques make use of a file that contains words, phrases, general passwords, and other combinations of letters that are more likely to be used as a viable password.
Medusa
A popular penetration testing tool, Medusa is known to be speedy, parallel, and modular, login brute-forcer. The aim is to support as many services that allow remote authentication as possible. Some of the key features of this tool are thread-based parallel testing, flexible user input, modular design, and support for multiple protocols. There are no modifications necessary to the core application for extending the supported list of services to brute-force. If you are a Kali user, Medusa comes pre-installed with it. For Linux distribution, you need to head over to password cracking on the applications menu to find Medusa.
Nikto
Nikto is an open-source software basically used to scan a web server for vulnerabilities that can be exploited and compromise the server. It is written in Perl language and performs checks for around 300 version-specific problems on web servers, 1200 outdated server versions, and 6400 potentially dangerous files and scripts. It is a pluggable CGI scanner that uses rfp’s LibWhisker to perform fast security on informational checks. Nikto’s top features include proxy support, generic and specific server software checks, report generation in plain text or HTML, easily updatable CSV-format checks database, and available HTTP versions automatic switching.
OpenVAS
OpenVAS is a full-featured vulnerability scanner developed and driven forward by Greenbone Networks company since 2006. Ethical hackers love this tool as it enables authenticated and unauthenticated testing, performance tuning for large-scale scans, various low-level and high-level internet and industrial protocols, and a powerful internal programming language to execute any kind of vulnerability test. The tool can detect security issues in all manners of servers and network devices. Supporting a database of over 530000 test plugins, OpenVAS gives you a complete vulnerability management solution.
Now that you are familiar with the top ethical hacking tools, which one will you start exploring?