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11 Best Penetration Testing Tools

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Cyril James
11 Best Penetration Testing  Tools

Have you been searching for a penetration testing tool that would best serve your security testing requirements for web applications and network? Do you want to compare and analyse different penetration testing tools and decide on which one(s) would be best suited for your enterprise?

Or are you simply curious to know which tools are out there and what their features are?

If yes, then this blog has you covered.

Whether the pen test is conducted for regulatory compliance, security assessment, or strengthening the IT environment’s defence against cyber security threats, a combination of the right tools is crucial.

If the penetration tester doesn’t have access to the right tools, chances are vulnerabilities, some critical, may not be detected and hence, reported giving a false sense of security.

Here are 11 pen testing tools that are very apt at detecting vulnerabilities and accurately simulating cyberattacks. Let’s have a look at their features and advantages, and platforms they are compatible with.

1. Burp Suite Pro

Burp Suite Pro one of the most popular, powerful and advanced pen testing tool that can help pentesters to fix and exploit vulnerabilities and to identify their target’s more subtle blind spots. It is a “suite” of various advanced tools and, is best suited for penetration testing of web applications.

There are two versions – the community edition offers necessary features such as intercepting browser traffic, managing recon data and out of band capabilities necessary for manual pen testing, while the pro version offers several advanced features such as scanning web application for vulnerabilities.

Burp Suite Pro has several features that are incredibly helpful for pentesters, such as the few listed below.

It has a powerful proxy component that performs man-in-the-middle attacks to intercept transfer of data, and lets the user modify the HTTP(S) communication passing through the browser.

  • Burp Suite helps test out-of-band (OOB) vulnerabilities (those that cannot be detected in a traditional HTTP request-response) during manual testing.
  • The tool finds hidden target functionalities through an automatic discovery function.
  • The tool offers faster brute-forcing and fuzzing capabilities which enable pentesters to deploy the custom sequence of HTTP requests that contain payload sets, which drastically reduces the time spent on different tasks.
  • Burpsuite pro offers a feature to easily construct cross-site request forgery (CSRF) Proof of Concept (POC) attack for a given request.
  • The tool also facilitates deeper manual testing as it can provide a view for reflected or stored inputs.
  • The BApp store provides access to hundreds of community generated plugins which are written and tested by Burp users.

Usage - Best for professionals and expert penetration testers who want to leverage a powerful automated and advanced manual testing tool to uncover critical application-level flaws.
Parent company - PortSwigger
Platforms - The supported platforms include macOS, Linux, and Windows.

2. SQLmap

SQLmap is an open source but a very powerful pen testing tool that expert pen testers use to identify and exploit SQL Injection vulnerabilities impacting different databases. It is an incredible pen-testing tool that comes with a robust detection engine that can retrieve precious data through a single command.

Below are some of the popular and beneficial features of SQLmap:

  • Using a dictionary-based attack, SQLmap helps with automatic recognition of password hash formats and support for cracking them.
  • It efficiently searches for specific database names, tables, or columns across the entire database, which is useful in identifying tables that contain application credentials containing string like name and pass.
  • SQLmap supports to establish an out-of-band TCP connection between the database server and the attacker machine providing user with interactive command prompt or a meterpreter session.
  • The tool supports downloading and uploading any file from/to the databases it is compatible with.

Usage - It is best detecting and exploiting SQL Injection flaws and taking over database servers.
Parent company - Open-source tool available in GNU (General Public License)
Platforms - MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite, Firebird, SAP MaxDB.

3. Aircrack-ng

Aircrack-ng is a network security pen testing tool that comes with a series of utilities to assess Wi-Fi networks for possible vulnerabilities. It provides critical operations of monitoring, testing, attacking, and cracking.
This tool allows the tester to capture data packets and export the data to text files for further processing by other third-party tools. It has the capability to carry out replay attacks, de-authentication attacks, and creates fake access points via packet injection. The tool also helps to check Wi-Fi cards and driver capabilities, and can be used to crack WEP and WPA WPA.

Other features include:

  • The tool is best known for its capability to crack WEP and WPA-PSK without any authenticated client, where it employs a statistical method for cracking WEP and brute force attack to crack WPA-PSK.
  • Aircrack-ng is a complete suite that includes a detector, packet sniffer, analytical tools, and WEP and WPA/WPA2-PSK crackers.
  • Aircrack-ng suite contains tools such as airodump-ng, aireplay-ng, aircrack-ng, and airdecap-ng tools
  • Airodump-ng is used to capture raw 802.11 packets.
  • Airplay-ng is used to injects frames into wireless traffic which is then used by Aircrack-ng to crack the WEP and WPA-PSK keys once enough data packets have been captured.
  • Airdecap-ng is used to decrypt captured files and can also be used to strip wireless headers.

Usage - It is a great suite of tools for penetration testers for hacking WI-FI networks. It is a command line tool and allows customisation.
Parent company - Open-source tool available in GNU (General Public License)
Platforms - Supported platforms include Linux, OS X Solaris, and Windows.

4. Wireshark

Wireshark is a must have network protocol analyzer. It is widely used to capture live network traffic for network trouble shooting including latency issues, packet drops and malicious activity on the network. It allows the testers to intercept and analyze data passed through the network and converts it into a human readable format.

Some crucial features of Wireshark:

  • Wireshark has powerful features that offers deep inspection of numerous protocols
  • It comes with a standard three-pane packet browser and powerful display filters.
  • Wireshark allows the data to be browsed through GUI or via TTY-mode TShark utility.
  • It can read and write different file formats such as tcpdump (libpcap), Pcap NG, Catapult DCT2000, Cisco Secure IDS iplog, Microsoft Network Monitor, Network General Sniffer® (compressed and uncompressed) and more.
  • The tool offers decryption support for different protocols including IPsec, ISAKMP, Kerberos, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, WEP, and WPA/WPA2.
  • The tools also allow inspection of VOIP traffic.

Usage - Best suited for Administrators for network troubleshooting and pentesters for analysing sensitive network data.
Parent company - Open-source tool available in GNU (General Public License)
Platforms - MacOS, Linux, Solaris, and Windows are a few supported platforms.

5. Nmap

Nmap is one of the best and pentesters favourite open-source penetration testing tools that help to identify open ports and vulnerabilities in network. It also helps to identify which devices are running on the network and discovering hosts that are live.

The other features that the tool offers are:

  • Enumerating open ports using port scanning capabilities and version detection engine used for determining application name and version number on the services running on identified ports.
  • NMAP contains over 2900 OS fingerprints which is useful in determining the operating systems of the underlying hosts.
  • NMAP is basically a command line utility, however it also offers a GUI version called Zenmap GUI
  • The Nmap scripting engine comes with over 170 NSE scripts and 20 libraries such as firewall-bypass, super micro-ipmi-conf, oracle-brute-stealth and ssl-heartbleed.
  • It offers better IPv6 support that makes way for more comprehensive network scanning in CIDR-style address ranges, Idle Scan, parallel reverse-DNS and more NSE script coverage.
  • NMAP offers some amazing, advanced scanning techniques such as bypassing firewall or WAF that can help pentesters to bypass security devices implemented on the network perimeter.

Usage - Considered as the best tool by pen testers to identify network level vulnerabilities.
Parent company - Open-source tool available in GNU (General Public License)
Platforms - The platforms that support the tool include Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, NetBSD, Sun OS, and Amiga.

Check out original content source here: Popular Penetration Testing Tools to know more tools

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