Open Source Hacking Tools for Security Auditing

Contrary to popular belief, a hacker is not the bad guy who breaks into your computer security to steal your information.

Rather, let us think of him as the one who helps to strengthen your computer and your network system security.

Although expensive, there are some great tools on the market which provide an in-depth analysis when snooping around to detect intrusion.

The budget–conscious consumer or small enterprise can access a large number of fantastic tools available free of cost, and these are actively developed by the community.

Here Are some Must-Have Hacking Tools:

Network Mapper (Nmap)

This is a free open source utility you can use to explore your network for security auditing. You can use it for a single host or for rapidly scanning large networks.

Network and system administrators use it for conducting network inventory, monitoring host or service uptime and for managing service upgrade schedules.

Remote Security Scanner – Nessus:

Nessus is an extremely popular vulnerability scanner, which has led to significant savings for many of the world’s largest organizations. Most enterprises use it to audit their devices used for business-critical applications. Nessus works within a client-server framework.

Wireshark

If you want to interactively browse and capture the contents of network frames, you can use Wireshark, the open source free network protocol analyzer.

This commercial-quality sniffer or analyzer is designed for UNIX and has some special features that are not available even with closed-source (not free) sniffers.

Cain and Abel

This program helps to exploit vulnerabilities and bugs that can be fixed with little effort.

Fundamentally, this is a tool to recover passwords from Microsoft Operating Systems.

Any kind of password may be recovered by sniffing the network, including encrypted passwords using Dictionary, Cryptanalysis and Brute-Force methods.

Kismet

If you are looking for a simple and free wireless network detector, sniffer and an intrusion detector system, you can give Kismet a try. Kismet works on 802.11 layer2 wireless networks. The only requirement is your card must support raw monitoring or rfmon mode.

Netstumbler

You can detect WLANs or Wireless Local Area Networks using Netstumbler.

This is a wireless tool for the Windows operating systems, and its Linux counterpart is much more powerful.

Netstumbler helps you set up and verify your network the way you want. It easily detects illegal vulnerable access points in your workplace and locates the areas with poor coverage.

Superscan:

Superscan is a powerful TCP port scanner, pinger and resolver. The updated version for Windows is Superscan 4. It also works as an alternative for Nmap on Windows. Another alternative is to use Angry IP Scanner.

Netsleuth:

If you want to monitor your network silently to identify and fingerprint network devices, try the open source tool Netsleuth. This is a network forensics and analysis tool, designed for situations requiring triage of incident response. Netsleuth monitors your network, provides cyber security and analyzes network forensics.

With this tool, it is easy to get a real-time overview of the type of devices and people who are connected to the Ethernet or Wi-Fi network.

Netsleuth can identify a large variety of devices, including tablets, printers, desktops, tablets and smartphones. It works well with other tools such as Kismet or tcpdump and aids in network forensics and intrusion response.

Nikto2:

Nikto2 is a scanner for web servers that performs comprehensive tests for multiple items. It can check for versionspecific problems in more than 270 types of servers and can detect more than 1200 versions of updated servers. .

Nikto2 also detects the presence of multiple index files and HTTP server options.

Ettercap:

Ettercap can comprehensively sniff out man-in-the-middle attacks on live connections. It has plenty of features for host and network analysis and supports passive or active dissection of several protocols.