Used in port scanning, one of the phases in ethical hacking, is the finest hacking tool ever. Primarily a command-line tool, it was then developed for operating systems based on Linux or Unix, and the windows version of Nmap is now available.
Nmap is basically a network security mapper capable of discovering services and hosts on a network, thereby creating a network map. This software offers several features that help in probing computer networks, host discovery as well as detection of operating systems. Being script extensible it provides advanced vulnerability detection and can also adapt to network conditions such as congestion and latency while scanning.
Nikto is a web scanner that scans and tests several web servers for identifying software that are outdated, dangerous CGIs or files and other problems. It is capable of performing server-specific as well as generic checks and prints by capturing the received cookies. It is a free, open-source tool, which checks version-specific problems across 270 servers and identifies default programs and files.
Here are some of the chief features of Nikto:
Open source tool
Checks web servers and identifies over 6400 CGIs or files that are potentially dangerous
Checks servers for outdated versions as well as version-specific problems
Checks plug-inns and misconfigured files
Identifies insecure programs and files
Ettercap stands for Ethernet Capture. It is a network security tool for Man-in-the-Middle attacks. It features sniffing of live connections, content filtering on the fly and many other interesting tricks. Ettercap has inbuilt features for network and host analysis. It supports active and passive dissection of many protocols.
You can run Ettercap on all the popular operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Angry IP scanner is a lightweight, cross-platform IP address and port scanner. It can scan IP addresses in any range. It can be freely copied and used anywhere. In order to increase the scanning speed, it uses multithreaded approach, wherein a separate scanning thread is created for each scanned IP address.
Angry IP Scanner simply pings each IP address to check if it’s alive, and then, it resolves its hostname, determines the MAC address, scans ports, etc. The amount of gathered data about each host can be saved to TXT, XML, CSV, or IP-Port list files. With help of plugins, Angry IP Scanner can gather any information about scanned IPs.
Burp Suite is a popular platform that is widely used for performing security testing of web applications. It has various tools that work in collaboration to support the entire testing process, from initial mapping and analysis of an application's attack surface, through to finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities.
Burp is easy to use and provides the administrators full control to combine advanced manual techniques with automation for efficient testing. Burp can be easily configured and it contains features to assist even the most experienced testers with their work.
Metasploit is one of the most powerful exploit tools. It’s a product of Rapid7 and most of its resources can be found at: www.metasploit.com. It comes in two versions − commercial and free edition. Matasploit can be used with command prompt or with Web UI.
With Metasploit, you can perform the following operations −
Conduct basic penetration tests on small networks
Run spot checks on the exploitability of vulnerabilities
Discover the network or import scan data
Browse exploit modules and run individual exploits on hosts
Note : Their are many more tools in later chapter you will be learned.