Hacking software is used by cybersecurity professionals to assess the security of computer systems or networks, identify any potential vulnerabilities and make recommendations on how best to resolve them. In some instances, such as password theft and Distributed Denial of Service attacks, hacking software can even be used for malicious purposes – for instance by criminals seeking an entryway into computers.
Nessus
Nessus is an open-source vulnerability scanner designed to identify software flaws and vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit. It does this by running over 1200 checks on each computer to look for potential hacker exploits which would enable them to attack or gain entry to networks or machines.
Scan a host’s ports to identify services listening on them and test for vulnerabilities that hackers might exploit, testing TCP/UDP/SMTP protocol scans as needed to complete its assessment.
IT security teams frequently turn to Vulnerability Scanner due to its plug-in architecture and extensibility, along with its scripting language for creating customized tests and improving scanning performance. Furthermore, its daily updated plugin database reduces any gaps between new vulnerabilities being discovered and being addressed.
Aircrack-Ng
Aircrack-Ng suite of tools provides users with the means to audit and hack wireless networks, crack WEP keys, perform various security tests and analyze and manipulate traffic flows. It was specifically developed with ethical hackers and penetration testers in mind.
This suite includes four tools: airmon-ng, airodump-ng, aircrack-ng and aireplay-ng. airmon-ng is used as a monitoring mode to capture packets from wireless network traffic as well as identify any connected devices; while airodump-ng provides data required to crack a WEP key – including Initialization Vectors (IVs).
Aireplay-ng is an essential tool in Aircrack-Ng’s suite, as it generates fake authentication and packet injection attacks to manipulate wireless networks. Furthermore, this application supports numerous attack types such as deauthentication and ARP request injection.
Wireshark
Wireshark is one of the most effective tools available to monitor network traffic. It gives an in-depth view into how a network functions and can detect issues that could hinder performance.
Supports various capture file formats and displays them with different colors based on filter criteria. It allows users to search packets based on specific criteria, providing users with an effective means of detecting malicious activity or suspicious communications.
Gerald Combs began work on Wireshark (originally Ethereal) while working at a small Internet service provider. After realizing that commercial protocol analysis products were too costly and did not support his primary server types, he created his own solution using open source technologies such as Python.
Recon-ng
Recon-ng is a free open-source web reconnaissance tool that makes OSINT activities possible. With an interface reminiscent of Metasploitable 1 and 2, Recon-ng helps OSINT analysts conduct OSINT activities. It features modules to locate holes in websites’ code and applications’ applications using Shodan for IoT device scanning, geoip lookup, banner grabbing, DNS search and port scans – among others.
Recon-ng offers several methods for speeding up information gathering on targets quickly. When starting off, creating a workspace with seed data and resources files to run recon-ng commands faster is recommended; resource files contain one recon-ng command per line that run immediately as though typed directly on the command line – making this an excellent way of gathering intelligence fast!
L0phtCrack
L0phtCrack is a tool used to assess password strength and recover lost Windows passwords using dictionary, brute force and rainbow attacks. Additionally, there are management functions such as account disabling. L0phtCrack was created by Peiter Zatko of L0pht’s hacker think tank under his moniker Mudge; its free software download can be found online and requires multiprocessor machines but runs at low priority so can even run on servers with idle CPUs.
You can retrieve password hashes from SAM files on a hard disk or from an NT Emergency Repair Disk/backup tape using this application. Furthermore, it offers hybrid methods of password breaking that build upon dictionary attacks by appending numerical and symbol characters to word lists; saving its state to an LC file allows for continuity if an interruption arises during cracking sessions.
