Ethical hacking covers a diverse range of techniques used to discover vulnerabilities in an organization’s cyberdefenses in order in order to help protect them against cyber attacks. As attacks come in many shapes and sizes, honest hackers should make sure they mirror methods used by criminals. Thankfully, various tools are available to emulate and automate some of the hacking process.
The following are five ethical hacking tools every hacker should know how in order to use.
1. Nmap
To hack a company, an ethical hacker needs to discover its weak spots plus possible points of entry. Nmap is a free tool that scans an organization’s infrastructure for open ports. If open ports are found , honest hackers can then run scripts against them to determine vulnerabilities and whether the vulnerabilities provide an entry point into the company network.
Be aware that Nmap is just a starting point; ethical hackers need to have skills and knowledge to use the information Nmap scans return.
2 . Gobuster
Gobuster is like Nmap for websites. Many web sites have hidden links, with regard to example, in order to extra login pages or administrative areas of the site. Gobuster tests for concealed areas not indexed by Google or even discoverable through normal website interaction. These can provide alternative avenues to explore and lead to administrative interfaces that can be brute-forced or logged in to with credentials stolen from data breaches.
3. Burp Suite Professional
An essential component of any ethical hacker tool set, Burp Suite Professional will be hands down the best device for assessing a website’s security. It is a proxy tool that intercepts requests and responses between an user’s browser and the website, providing visibility into how the particular website functions. This enables ethical hackers to manipulate those requests in order to trigger vulnerabilities in the website or even gain access to prohibited areas.
A free version of Burp Suite Pro is available, but it lacks many useful capabilities, such as automatically scanning sites for known vulnerabilities. The Pro edition costs $449 per user per year.
4. Metasploit Framework
The particular key difference between the vulnerability assessment and a penetration test is the latter has an exploitation phase. In the pen testing exploitation phase, the vulnerability is usually discovered and then exploited to see if any further weaknesses can be detected.
Metasploit Framework , a penetration testing tool, has more than 2, 000 exploits to check against the system. The tool goes well beyond demonstrating vulnerability exploitability. It also enables cyber-terrorist to keep track of their targets and create custom payloads to evade antimalware.
Metasploit Framework is definitely free; a Pro version is also available regarding commercial make use of.
5. Python
Although not a hacking device per se, honest hackers must be flexible and be able to tweak existing scripts or write their own scripts for each engagement. Python may be the go-to tool intended for writing custom scripts. Learning how to use Python during pencil testing ought to be high on every ethical hacker’s agenda.