Ethical Hacking − Tools
In this chapter, we will discuss in brief some
of famous tools that are widely used to prevent
hacking and getting unauthorized access to a computer or network system.
Ethical Hacking − Tools advance ethical hacking course
1. Nmap
Nmap stands for Network Mapper. It is an open source tool that is used
widely for network
discovery and security auditing.
Nmap was originally designed to scan large networks, but
it can work equally well for single
hosts. Network administrators also find it useful for tasks
such as network inventory, managing service upgrade
schedules, and monitoring host or
service uptime.
Nmap uses raw IP packets to
determine:
what hosts are available on the network,
what services those hosts are offering,
what
operating systems they are running on,
what type of firewalls are in use, and other
such characteristics.
Nmap runs on all major computer operating systems such as Windows, Mac
OS X, and
Linux.
2. Metasploit
Metasploit is one of the most powerful exploit tools. It’s a product of
Rapid7 and most of
its
resources can be
found at: www.metasploit.com. It comes
in two versions −
commercial and free edition. Matasploit can be used with command
prompt or with Web
UI.
With
Metasploit, you can perform the following operations:
Conduct basic
penetration tests on small networks
Run spot checks
on the exploitability of vulnerabilities
Discover the
network or import scan data
Browse exploit modules and run individual
exploits on hosts
3. Burp Suite
Burp Suite is
a popular platform that is widely used for performing security testing of web applications. It has various tools that work in
collaboration to support the entire testing process, from initial mapping and
analysis of an application's attack surface, through to finding and
exploiting security vulnerabilities.
Burp is easy to use and provides the administrators full control to
combine advanced manual
techniques with automation for efficient testing. Burp can be easily configured
and it contains features to assist even the most experienced testers with their
work.
4. Angry IP Scanner
Angry IP
scanner is a lightweight, cross-platform IP address and port scanner. It can
scan IP addresses in any range. It can be
freely copied and used anywhere. In order to increase the scanning
speed, it uses multithreaded approach, wherein a separate scanning thread is
created for each scanned IP address.
Angry IP
Scanner simply pings each IP address to check if it’s alive, and then, it
resolves its hostname, determines the MAC
address, scans ports, etc. The amount of gathered data about each host
can be saved to TXT, XML, CSV, or IP-Port list files. With help of plugins,
Angry IP Scanner can gather any information about scanned IPs.
5. Cain & Abel
Cain &
Abel is a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It helps in
easy recovery of various kinds of passwords by employing any of the following
methods:
- sniffing the network
- cracking encrypted passwords using Dictionary,
Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks
- recording VoIP conversations
- decoding scrambled passwords,
- recovering wireless network keys
- revealing password boxes,
- uncovering cached passwords and analyzing routing
protocols
Cain & Abel is a useful tool for security consultants, professional
penetration testers and everyone else who plans to use it for
ethical reasons.
Ethical Hacking − Tools advance ethical hacking course
6. Ettercap
Ettercap stands for Ethernet Capture. It is a network security tool for
Man-in-the-Middle attacks. It
features sniffing of live connections, content filtering on the fly and many
other interesting tricks. Ettercap has
inbuilt features for network and host analysis. It supports active and passive
dissection of many protocols.
You can run Ettercap on all the popular operating systems such as
Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
7. EtherPeek
EtherPeek is a
wonderful tool that
simplifies network analysis
in a multiprotocol heterogeneous network environment. EtherPeek
is a small tool (less than 2 MB) that can be
easily installed in a matter of few minutes.
EtherPeek proactively sniffs traffic packets on a network. By default,
EtherPeek supports protocols such
as AppleTalk, IP, IP Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), NetWare, TCP, UDP, NetBEUI, and NBT packets.
8. SuperScan
SuperScan is a powerful tool for network administrators to scan TCP ports
and resolve hostnames. It has a user friendly
interface that you can use to:
Perform ping scans and port scans using any
IP range.
Scan any port range from a built-in list or
any given range.
View responses from connected hosts.
Modify the port list and port descriptions
using the built in editor.
Merge port lists
to build new ones.
Connect to any discovered open port.
Assign a custom helper application to any
port.
9. QualysGuard
QualysGuard is an integrated suite of tools that can be utilized to
simplify security operations and
lower the cost of compliance. It delivers critical security intelligence on
demand and automates the full spectrum of auditing, compliance and protection
for IT systems and web applications.
QualysGuard includes a set of tools that can monitor, detect, and protect
your global
network.
10. WebInspect
WebInspect is a web application security assessment tool that helps
identify known and unknown vulnerabilities within the
Web application layer.
It can also help check that a Web server is configured properly, and
attempts common
web attacks such as parameter
injection, cross-site scripting, directory traversal, and
more.
11. LC4
LC4 was
formerly known as L0phtCrack. It is
a password auditing
and recovery application. It is used to test password strength
and sometimes to recover lost Microsoft Windows passwords, by using
dictionary, brute-force, and hybrid attacks.
LC4 recovers Windows user account passwords to streamline migration of
users to another authentication system or to access accounts whose passwords
are lost.
12. LANguard Network Security
Scanner
LANguard Network Scanner monitors a network by scanning connected
machines and providing information about each
node. You can obtain information about each individual operating system.
It can also detect registry issues and have a report set up in HTML
format. For each
computer, you can list the netbios name table, current logged-on user,
and Mac address.
13. Network Stumbler
Network stumbler is a WiFi scanner and monitoring tool for Windows. It
allows network professionals to detect WLANs. It is widely used by networking
enthusiasts and hackers because it helps you find
non-broadcasting wireless networks.
Network
Stumbler can be used to verify if a network is well configured, its signal
strength or coverage, and detect
interference between one or more wireless networks. It can also be used to
non-authorized connections.
14. ToneLoc
ToneLoc stands
for Tone Locator. It was a popular war dialling computer program written
for MS-DOS in the early 90’s. War
dialling is a technique of using a modem to automatically
scan a list of telephone numbers,
usually dialling every number in a local area code.
Malicious hackers use the resulting lists in breaching computer
security - for guessing user accounts, or locating modems that might provide an entry-point into
computer or other electronic systems.
It can be used by security personnel to detect unauthorized devices on a
company’s telephone network.
