Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
Nmap
Nmap, short for Network Mapper, is a reconnaissance tool that is widely used by ethical hackers to gather information about a target system. This information is key to deciding the proceeding steps to attack the target system. Nmap is cross-platform and works on Mac, Linux, and Windows. It has gained immense popularity in the hacking community due to its ease of use and powerful searching and scanning abilities.
Using Nmap you can:
- Audit device security
- Detect open ports on remote hosts
- Network mapping and enumeration
- Find vulnerabilities inside any network
- Launch massive DNS queries against domains and subdomains
Wireshark
Wireshark is free open-source software that allows you to analyze network traffic in real-time. Thanks to its sniffing technology, Wireshark is widely known for its ability to detect security problems in any network, as well as for its effectiveness in solving general networking problems. While sniffing the network, you’re able to intercept and read results in a human-readable format, which makes it easier to identify potential problems (such as low latency), threats and vulnerabilities.
Main features:
- Saves analysis for offline inspection
- Packet browser
- Powerful GUI
- Rich VoIP analysis
- Inspects and decompresses gzip files
- Reads other capture file-formats including Sniffer Pro, Tcpdump, Microsoft network monitor, Cisco Secure IDS IP log, etc.
- Exports results to XML, PostScript, CSV, or plain text
Wireshark supports up to 2000 different network protocols, and is available on all major operating systems including:
- Linux
- Windows
- Mac OS X
Wapiti
Wapiti is a free open-source command-line based vulnerability scanner written in Python. While it’s not the most popular ethical hacking tool in this field, it does a good job of finding security flaws in many web applications. Using Wapiti can help you to discover security holes including:
- XSS attacks
- SQL injections
- XPath injections
- XXE injections
- CRLF injections
- Server-side request forgery