Top 6 Hacking Tools Security Teams Should Know About

With the term ‘hacking’ often conjured up in a pejorative sense, it can also mean an ethical hacker doing a job of fixing and/or bringing attention to a security flaw, before a malicious hacker or an attacker takes advantage of a vulnerability. Here are the top 6 hacking tools that every security professional ought to know about.
 
The term hacker can denote two different professions, with vastly varying intentions:
Hackers
    A hacker is usually an individual who is extremely good at computer programming, networking and often shares knowledge with other hackers to ensure fundamental and vital online systems have the necessary security.
    A hacker can also be someone who uses their expert computer knowledge and skills to gain unauthorized access to systems, networks, governments and corporations among others, often for selfish gain.
Hacking tools
A hacking tool is a program or utility designed to assist a hacker for hacking. At some point, similar programs were inevitably used by the top 10 hackers of all time. Tools for hacking can proactively be used to protect a network or computer, from hackers and intruders.
The top 6 hacking tools
Here are some of the best hacking tools made available, many of them being open source.
1) Burp Suite
Burp Suite goes a long way in helping white-hat hackers (ethical hackers) and security researchers. The ‘Burp Suite Spider’ is a popular application that comes with the software, doing an excellent task of numbering and sequentially mapping out multiple pages of a website. This includes the parameters as well, along with scanning cookies and kick-starting connections among web applications that are existing in the website. The tool is particularly popular among penetration testers, who use it as a web hacking tool for checking and testing pre-existing vulnerabilities in websites.
2) Voyeur
Voyeur does its job in analyzing and looking up threats by scanning through the Active Directory Services, looking through existing data. An accurate report is generated, showing end users and other devices in any given network. The tool also helps first incident responders to gather essential information that helps with looking into future security investigations, addressing the incidents. All of this can be done without using any admin credentials and the report can be exported into an easily readable CSV file that’s compatible with your spreadsheet reader.
3) Viproy
Viproy also helps penetration testers to target vulnerabilities that are endemic in multimedia sessions, particularly VoIP communications. It also improves on the quality of these tests. Countless demonstrations show how effective a tool Viproy can be, in the way it easily discovers VoIP devices in a network and tags any attempt to manipulate pre-existing data and functions. This includes the altering of speed-dial, unauthorized calls and more. The tool is also compatible with Cisco, Microsoft link and other VoIP vendors.
4) Snort
Snort operates in three different modes, each of which functions as an effective hacking and network tool. The three modes are: Sniffer, packet logger and network intrusion detection. Network packets are read in the first mode, which are quickly displayed readily in an easy-to-read GUI. The Packet Logger mode enables Snort to record and log specific data packets, onto the disk directly. In the last mode, network traffic is monitored and logged, while being analysed by the program against a pre-set rule by the user.
5) Ettercap
Ettercap is a tool that cybersecurity experts, researchers and professionals swear by. Working promiscuously, Ettercap places itself within the users’ network interface. Furthermore, it is capable of hacking target machines, initiating or mimicking a ‘Man in the Middle’ attack. Ettercap is also popular with the tool being compatible with many plugins that can work in tandem with the tool and add to it.
6) Cain & Abel
Cain & Abel is primarily used for Microsoft systems and computers, as a password recovery & hack tool. Looking through the network, Brute-force methods, referring to a dictionary to crack encrypted passwords are all in a quick run’s work for this tool. Popular among the hacking community in being simply known as ‘Cain’, the tool can also retrieve passwords for wireless networks, record conversations over VoIP software and more.

Here are some of the other tools, which you can use too.

Wireshark, Nexpose, Metasplot, NMAP, Nessus, Jhon The Ripper, Aircrack, Netcat/NCAT, Havij, Pangolin, TCPDump, Nikto, Kismet, W3AF, OpenVAS, THC Hydra, Paros proxy, Wapiti, Aircrack-NG, inSSIDer, NetCop, Zitmo NoM, Maltrieve, Snoopy, Taintless, Ice-Hole, SET, Viproy, Nimbostratus, BeEF, Dradis, NetSparker, SQLMap, SQLNinja, dsniff, EtherApe, Splunk, Nagios, pfSense, P0f, IPCop, Alien Vault, Yersinia, Nemesis, Socat, Cryptcat, Hping, Scapy, L0phtCrack, fgdump, PWDump, Ophcrack, Medusa, RainbowCrack, Wfuzz, Tor. These are the few number of best of the best tools for hacking/security as well.

Conclusion

These above tools are among the popular many, which help security researchers and ethical hackers locate and discover software vulnerabilities. They help bypass the clutter that encumbers most businesses in looking for vulnerabilities when it comes to cybersecurity, which may or may not be repaired by software makers. They are hack-tools that can be used for the improvement of online security and should readily exist among the tools used by security professionals and researchers.
SecureKnow: http://bit.ly/1BlWx4N