What is The Best Hacking Software and Tools

What is The Best Hacking Software and Tools? are computer programs and scripts that help you find and exploit weaknesses in computer systems, web applications, servers, and networks. There is a variety of such tools available on the market. Some of them are open source while others are the commercial solution.

A hacking tool is a program or utility designed to assist a hacker with hacking. It can also be proactively utilized to protect a network or computer from hackers.  Hacking is an intentional modification of computer software or hardware that is outside the architectural perimeters and design. Hacking tools come in a wide variety of applications and are specifically created to assist in hacking. A hacking tool is commonly used to gain unauthorized access to a PC to insert worms, sniffers, viruses and Trojan horses.

What is The Best Hacking Software and Tools

We’ve compiled some of the most popular penetration testing tools to help you through the first steps of a security investigation. You’ll find some of the classic tools that seem to have been around forever and some new tools that might not be familiar.

John the Ripper

John the Ripper is one of the most popular password crackers of all time. It’s also one of the best security tools available to test password strength in your operating system, or for auditing one remotely.

This password cracker is able to auto-detect the type of encryption used in almost any password and will change its password test algorithm accordingly, making it one of the most intelligent passwords cracking tools ever.

This ethical hacking tool uses brute force technology to decipher passwords and algorithms such as:

• DES, MD5, Blowfish
• Kerberos AFS
• Hash LM (Lan Manager), the system used in Windows NT / 2000 / XP / 2003
• MD4, LDAP, MySQL (using third-party modules)

Another bonus is that JTR is open source, multi-platform and fully available for Mac, Linux, Windows and Android.

Metasploit

Metasploit is an open source cyber-security project that allows infosec professionals to use different penetration testing tools to discover remote software vulnerabilities. It also functions as an exploit module development platform.

One of the most famous results of this project is the Metasploit Framework, written in Ruby, which enables you to develop, test and execute exploits easily. The framework includes a set of security tools that can be used to:

• Evade detection systems
• Run security vulnerability scans
• Execute remote attacks
• Enumerate networks and hosts

Metasploit offers three different versions of its software:

• Pro: ideal for penetration testing and IT security teams.
• Community: used by small companies and infosec students.
• Framework: the best for app developers and security researchers.

Supported platforms include:

• Mac OS X
• Linux
• Windows

 GFI LanGuard

GFI LanGuard is an ethical tool that scan networks for vulnerabilities. It can acts as your ‘virtual security consultant’ on demand. It allows for creating an asset inventory of every device.

Features:

• It helps to maintain a secure network over time is to know which changes are affecting your network and
• Patch management: Fix vulnerabilities before an attack
• Analyze network centrally
• Discover security threats early
• Reduce cost of ownership by centralizing vulnerability scanning
• Help to maintain a secure and compliant network

Savvis

It is an ethical hacking tool. It performance issues and reduces security risk with the deep visibility provided by Omnipeek. It can diagnose network issues faster and better with Savvius packet intelligence.

Features:

• Powerful, easy-to-use network forensics software
• Savvius automates the capture of the network data required to quickly investigate security alerts
• Software and integrated appliance solutions
• Packet intelligence combines deep analysis
• Rapid resolution of network and security issues
• Easy to use Intuitive workflow
• Expert and responsive technical support
• Onsite deployment for appliances
• Commitment to our customers and our products

QualysGuard

Qualys guard helps businesses streamline their security and compliance solutions. It also builds security into their digital transformation initiatives. This tool can also check the performance vulnerability of the online cloud systems.

Features:

• It is trusted globally
• No hardware to buy or manage
• It is a scalable, end-to-end solution for all aspects of IT security
• Vulnerability data securely stored and processed on an n-tiered architecture of load-balanced servers
• It sensor provides continuous visibility
• Data analyzed in real time
• It can respond to threats in a real-time

 

WebInspect

WebInspect is automated dynamic application security testing that allows performing ethical hacking techniques. It provides comprehensive dynamic analysis of complex web applications and services.

Features:

• Allows to test dynamic behavior of running web applications to identify security vulnerabilities
• Keep in control of your scan by getting relevant information and statistics at a glance
• Centralized Program Management
• Advanced technologies, such as simultaneous crawl professional-level testing to novice security testers
• Easily inform management on vulnerability trending, compliance management, and risk oversight

Hashcat

Hashcat is a robust password cracking ethical hacking tool. It can help users to recover lost passwords, audit password security, or just find out what data is stored in a hash.

Features:

• Open-Source platform
• Multi-Platform Support
• Allows utilizing multiple devices in the same system
• Utilizing mixed device types in the same system
• It supports distributed cracking networks
• Supports interactive pause/resume
• Supports sessions and restore
• Built-in benchmarking system
• Integrated thermal watchdog
• Supports automatic performance tuning

L0phtCrack

L0phtCrack 6 is a useful password audit and recovery tool. It identifies and assesses password vulnerability over local machines and networks.

Features:

• Multicore & multi-GPU support helps to optimize hardware
• Easy to customize
• Simple Password Loading
• Schedule sophisticated tasks for automated enterprise-wide password
• Fix weak passwords issues by forcing password resets or locking accounts
• It allows multiple auditing OSes

Rainbow Crack

RainbowCrack is a password cracking tool widely used for ethical hacking. It cracks hashes with rainbow tables. It uses a time-memory tradeoff algorithm for this purpose.

Features:

• Full time-memory trade-off tool suites, including rainbow table generation
• It Supports a rainbow table of any hash algorithm
• Support a rainbow table of any charset
• Support rainbow table in raw file format (.rt) and compact file format
• Computation on multi-core processor support
• GPU acceleration with multiple GPUs
• Runs on Windows OS and Linux
• Unified rainbow table file format on every supported OS
• Command line user interface
• Graphics user interface

IKECrack

IKECrack is an open source authentication crack tool. This ethical hacking tool is designed to brute-force or dictionary attack. This tool also allows performing cryptography tasks.

Features:

• IKECrack is a tool that allows performing Cryptography tasks
• Initiating client sends encryption options proposal, DH public key, random number, and an ID in an unencrypted packet to the gateway/responder.
• It is freely available for both personal and commercial use. Therefore, it is the perfect choice for the user who wants an option for Cryptography programs

Nmap

Nmap (Network Mapper) is a free open source security tool used by infosec professionals to manage and audit network and OS security for both local and remote hosts.

Despite being one of the oldest security tools in existence (launched in 1997), it continues to be actively updated and receives new improvements every year.

It’s also regarded as one of the most effective network mappers around, known for being fast and for consistently delivering thorough results with any security investigation.

What can you do with Nmap?

• 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

Supported platforms include:

• Mac OS X
• Linux, OpenBSD and Solaris
• Microsoft Windows

Wireshark

Wireshark is a 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 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 files formats including Sniffer Pro, tcpdump (libpcap), Microsoft network monitor, Cisco Secure IDS log, etc.
• Supported ports and network devices: Ethernet, IEEE 802.11, PPP/HDLC, ATM, Bluetooth, USB, Token Ring, Frame Relay, FDDI.
• Protocol decryption includes but not limited to IPsec, ISAKMP, Kerberos, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, WEP, and WPA/WPA2
• 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
• FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD

OpenVAS

OpenVAS (also known as the old classic “Nessus”) is an open-source network scanner used to detect remote vulnerabilities in any hosts. One of the best-known network vulnerability scanners, it’s very popular among system administrators and DevOps and infosec professionals.

Main features

• Powerful web-based interface
• +50,000 network vulnerability tests
• Simultaneous multiple host scanning
• Able to stop, pause and resume scan tasks
• False positive management
• Scheduled scans
• Graphics and statistics generation
• Exports results to plain text, XML, HTML or LateX
• Powerful CLI available
• Fully integrated with Nagios monitoring software

While its web-based interface allows it to be run from any operating system, a CLI is also available and works well for Linux, Unix, and Windows operating systems.

The free version can be downloaded from the OpenVAS website, but there is also a commercial enterprise license available from the Greenbone Security (parent company) website.

IronWASP

If you’re going to perform ethical hacking, IronWASP is another great tool. It’s free, open source and multi-platform, perfect for those who need to audit their web servers and public applications.

One of the most appealing things about IronWASP is that you don’t need to be an expert to manage its main features. It’s all GUI-based, and full scans can be performed in only a few clicks. So, if you’re just getting started with ethical hacking tools, this is a great way to start.

Some of its main features include:

• Powerful GUI-based interface
• Web scan sequence recording
• Exports results into HTML and RTF file format
• 25+ different web vulnerabilities
• False positive and negative management
• Full Python and Ruby support for its scripting engine
• Can be extended by using modules written in C#, Ruby, and Python
• Supported platforms: Windows, Linux with Wine, and MacOS using CrossOver

Nikto

Nikto is another favorite, well-known as part of the Kali Linux Distribution. Other popular Linux distributions such as Fedora already come with Nikto available in their software repositories as well.

This security tool is used to scan web servers and perform different types of tests against the specified remote host. Its clean and simple command line interface makes it really easy to launch any vulnerability testing against your target, as you can see in the following screenshot:

Nikto’s main features include:

• Detects default installation files on any OS
• Detects outdated software applications.
• Runs XSS vulnerability tests
• Launches dictionary-based brute force attacks
• Exports results into plain text, CSV or HTML files
• Intrusion detection system evasion with LibWhisker
• Integration with Metasploit Framework

SQLMap

sqlmap is a cool cyber-security tool written in Python that helps security researchers to launch SQL code injection tests against remote hosts. With SQLMap you can detect and test different types of SQL-based vulnerabilities to harden your apps and servers, or to report vulnerabilities to different companies.

Its SQL injection techniques include:

• UNION query-based
• time-based blind
• boolean-based blind
• error-based
• stacked queries
• out-of-band

Main features:

• Multiple database server support: Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and MSSQL, MS Access, DB2 or Informix.
• Automatic code injection capabilities
• Password hash recognition
• Dictionary-based password cracking
• User enumeration
• Get password hashes
• View user privileges and databases
• Database user privilege escalation
• Dump table information
• Executes remote SQL SELECTS

Check out the next video to see the true power of SQLMap using the sqlmap out-of-band injection working with Metasploit integration against Microsoft SQL Server:

SQLNinja

SQLNinja is another SQL vulnerability scanner bundled with Kali Linux distribution. This tool is dedicated to target and exploit web apps that use MS SQL Server as the backend database server. Written in Perl, SQLNinja is available in multiple Unix distros where the Perl interpreter is installed, including:

• Linux
• Mac OS X & iOS
• FreeBSD

SQLninja can be run in different types of modes such as:

• Test mode
• Verbose mode
• Fingerprint remote database mode
• Brute force attack with a word list
• Direct shell & reverse shell
• Scanner for outbound ports
• Reverse ICMP Shell
• DNS tunneled shell

Wapiti

Wapiti is a free open-source command-line based vulnerability scanner written in Python. While it’s not the most popular 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

Other features include:

• Runs in verbose mode
• Ability to pause and resume scans.
• Highlights vulnerabilities found inside the terminal
• Generates reports and export into HTML, XML, JSON, and TXT
• Activates and deactivates multiple attack modules
• Removes parameters from certain URLs
• Excludes URLs during an attack
• Bypasses SSL certificate verification
• URL extractor from javascript
• Timeout configuration for large scans
• Sets custom user-agent and HTTP headers

Maltego

Maltego is the perfect tool for intel gathering and data reconnaissance while you’re performing the first analysis of your target.

In this case, it can be used to correlate and determine relationships between people, names, phone numbers, email addresses, companies, organizations, and social network profiles.

Along with online resources like Whois data, DNS records, social networks, search engines, geolocation services, and online API services it can also be used to investigate the correlation between internet-based infrastructures including:

• Domain names
• DNS servers
• Netblocks
• IP addresses
• Files
• Web Pages

Main features include:

• GUI-based interface
• Analyzes up to 10.000 entities per graph
• Extended correlation capabilities
• Data sharing in real time
• The correlated data graphics generator
• Exports graphs to GraphML
• Generates entity lists
• Can copy and paste information

This application is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, and the only software requirement is to have Java 1.8 or greater installed.

AirCrack-ng

AirCrack-ng is a respected Wifi security suite for home and corporate security investigations. It includes full support for 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK networks and works by capturing network packets. It then analyzes and uses them to crack Wifi access.

For old-school security professionals, AirCrack-ng includes a fancy terminal-based interface along with a few more interesting features.

Main features:

• Extensive documentation (wiki, manpages)
• Active community (forums and IRC channels)
• Support for Linux, Mac and Windows Wifi detection
• Launches PTW, WEP and Fragmentation attacks
• Supports WPA Migration Mode
• Fast cracking speed
• Multiple Wifi card support
• Integration with 3rd party tools

As a bonus, it comes bundled with a lot of Wifi auditing tools including:

• airbase-ng
• aircrack-ng
• airdecap-ng
• airdecloak-ng
• airdriver-ng
• aireplay-ng
• airmon-ng
• airodump-ng
• airolib-ng
• airserv-ng
• airtun-ng
• easside-ng
• packetforge-ng
• tkiptun-ng
• wesside-ng
• airdecloak-ng

Reaver

Reaver is a great open-source alternative to Aircrack-ng that allows you to audit the security of any Wifi with WPA/WPA2 pass keys. It uses brute force Wifi attack techniques like Pixie dust attacks to crack Wifi-protected setups through common Wifi flaws and vulnerabilities.

Depending on how well-configured the router-level Wifi security is, it can take between 3 to 10 hours to get an effective brute-force cracking result.

Until recently, the original Reaver version was hosted at Google Cloud. After the release version of version 1.6,a forked community edition was launched in Github.

Build-time dependencies

• build-essential
• libpcap-dev

Runtime-time dependencies

• pixiewps (required for pixie dust attack)

It runs well on most Linux distributions.

Ettercap

Ettercap is a network interceptor and packet sniffer for LAN networks. It supports active and passive scans as well as various protocols, including encrypted ones such as SSH and HTTPS.

Other capabilities include network and host analysis (like OS fingerprint), as well as network manipulation over established connections — which makes this tool great for testing man-in-the-middle attacks.

Main features

• Active and passive protocol analysis
• Filters based on IP source and destination, Mac and ARP addresses
• Data injection into established connections
• SSH and HTTPS encryption-based protocols
• Sniffs remote traffic over GRE tunnel
• Extensible with plugins
• Protocol supports include Telnet, FTP, Imap, Smb, MySQL, LDAP, NFS, SNMP, HTTP, etc.
• Determines OS name and version
• Able to kill established LAN connections
• DNS Hijacking

Canvas

Canvas is a great alternative to Metasploit, offering more than 800 exploits for testing remote networks.

Main features

• Remote network exploitation
• Targets different kind of systems
• Targets selected geographic regions
• Takes screenshots of remote systems
• Downloads passwords
• Modifies files inside the system
• Escalates privileges to gain administrator access

This tool also lets you use its platform to write new exploits or use its famous shellcode generator. It also integrates an alternative to map called scanner and, which is especially useful for port scanning and host discovery over mid to large networks.

Supported platforms include:

• Linux
• MacOSX (requires PyGTK)
• Windows (requires Python and PyGTK)

Netsparker is an easy to use web application security scanner that can automatically find SQL Injection, XSS and other vulnerabilities in your web applications and web services. It is available as an on-premises and SAAS solution.

Features

• Dead accurate vulnerability detection with the unique Proof-Based Scanning Technology.
• Minimal configuration required. The scanner automatically detects URL rewrite rules, custom 404 error pages.
• REST API for seamless integration with the SDLC, bug tracking systems etc.
• Fully scalable solution. Scan 1,000 web applications in just 24 hours.

Acunetix

Acunetix is a fully automated ethical hacking solution that mimics a hacker to keep one step ahead of malicious intruders. The web application security scanner accurately scans HTML5, JavaScript and Single-page applications. It can audit complex, authenticated web apps and issues compliance and management reports on a wide range of web and network vulnerabilities.

Features:

• Scans for all variants of SQL Injection, XSS, and 4500+ additional vulnerabilities
• Detects over 1200 WordPress core, theme, and plugin vulnerabilities
• Fast & Scalable – crawls hundreds of thousands of pages without interruptions
• Integrates with popular WAFs and Issue Trackers to aid in the SDLC
• Available On-Premises and as a Cloud solution.

Probe.ly

Probe.ly continuously scans for vulnerabilities in your Web Applications. It allows its customers to manage the life cycle of vulnerabilities and provides them with some guidance on how to fix them. Probe.ly is a security tool built having Developers in mind.

Features:

• Scans for SQL Injections, XSS, OWASP TOP10 and over 5000 vulnerabilities, including 1000 WordPress and Joomla vulnerabilities
• Full API – All features of Probably are also available through an API
• Integration with your CI tools, Slack and Jira
• Unlimited team members
• PDF Reports showcasing your security
• Diverse scanning profiles (ranging from safe to aggressive scans)
• Multiple Environment Targets – Production (non-intrusive scans) and Testing (intrusive and complete scans)

Burp Suite

Burp Suite is a useful platform for performing Security Testing of web applications. Its various tools work seamlessly together to support the entire pen testing process. It spans from initial mapping to analysis of an application’s attack surface.

Features:

It can detect over 3000 web application vulnerabilities.

• Scan open-source software and custom-built applications
• An easy to use Login Sequence Recorder allows the automatic scanning
• Review vulnerability data with built-in vulnerability management.
• Easily provide a wide variety of technical and compliance reports
• Detects Critical Vulnerabilities with 100% Accuracy
• Automated crawl and scan
• Advanced scanning feature for manual testers
• Cutting-edge scanning logic

References

Show More