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【11 popular penetration testing tools worth recommending】

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This article will introduce you to 11 penetration testing tools suitable for detecting vulnerabilities and accurately simulating network attacks in terms of functionality, product advantages, applicability, and compatible platforms.

[51CTO.com Quick Translation] Have you been looking for the penetration testing tool that best meets your web application and network security requirements? Do you want to compare and analyze the differences between different penetration testing tools to determine which one is the most suitable? company? Or you just want to know what penetration testing tools have unique capabilities in the context of new technologies? Here, I will discuss with you 11 penetration tests that are ideal for detecting vulnerabilities and accurately simulating network attacks. tool. We will introduce them in terms of their respective functions, advantages, applicability, and compatible platforms.

1. Burp Suite Pro

Burp Suite Pro is one of the most popular and powerful advanced penetration testing tools available. It can assist testers to identify security blind spots in the system under test and exploit and repair vulnerabilities. With a variety of advanced tool suites, it is very suitable for penetration testing scenarios of web applications.

Currently, Burp Suite Pro comes in two versions:

  • Community Edition - Provides all necessary basic functions, such as intercepting browser traffic, managing reconnaissance data, and various out-of-band (OOB) functions required for manual testing.
  • Professional Edition - Provides some advanced features, such as scanning code-level vulnerabilities in web applications.

The main function -

  • Burp Suite has a powerful proxy component that can modify the browser's HTTP(S) communication by simulating a man-in-the-middle attack, thereby intercepting or tampering with data transmission.
  • It can help discover vulnerabilities (or out-of-band vulnerabilities) that cannot be detected in traditional HTTP request responses during manual testing.
  • It can discover hidden goals and functions through automatic discovery functions.
  • The tool provides faster brute force and fuzz testing capabilities to facilitate penetration testers deploying HTTP request sequences containing custom payload sets. Accordingly, they can significantly reduce the time spent on different tasks.
  • Burpsuite Pro makes it easy to construct a proof-of-concept (POC) type of attack based on Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF) for a given request.
  • To facilitate more in-depth manual testing, the tool also provides views that reflect stored input.
  • The App Store provides hundreds of community plug-ins written and tested by Burp users.

Suitability - Best suited for those professionals and penetration testers. They often hope to use powerful automation tools and advanced manual testing tools to discover program-level defects in critical applications.

Proprietary - PortSwigger.

Supported platforms – macOS, Linux and Windows.

2. SQLmap

SQLmap is an open source and powerful penetration testing tool. It comes with a powerful detection engine that can retrieve specific data with a single command. Professional penetration testers often use it to identify and exploit SQL injection vulnerabilities that affect various databases.

The main function:

  • By using a dictionary-based attack, SQLmap can automatically identify the hash format of a password and support cracking it.
  • It can efficiently search the entire database for specific database names, tables and columns. Because applications tend to store user credentials in strings such as name and pass, SQLmap can effectively identify such tables.
  • SQLmap supports establishing an out-of-band TCP connection between the database server and the attacker's host, thereby providing the user with an interactive command prompt or meterpreter session.
  • The tool supports downloading/uploading any file from a compatible database.

Suitability - Best suited for detecting and exploiting SQL injection vulnerabilities and taking over database servers.

Proprietary – Open source tool provided by GNU (General Public License).

Supported platforms - MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite, Firebird, SAP MaxDB.

3.Aircrack-ng

Aircrack-ng is a network security penetration testing tool. It can monitor, test, attack, crack, and assess whether there are vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi networks through a series of built-in utilities.

The tool allows testers to export captured packets to text files for further processing by other third-party tools. Aircrack-ng not only has the ability to perform replay attacks, shut down authentication attacks, and create fake access points through packet injection, it can also assist in checking Wi-Fi network cards, drivers, and WPA (1 and 2).

The main function:

  • This tool is good at cracking WEP and WPA-PSK without any client authentication. It mainly uses statistical methods to crack WEP and brute force attacks to crack WPA-PSK.
  • As a complete suite, Aircrack-ng contains detectors, packet sniffers, analysis tools, and crackers for WEP and WPA/WPA2-PSK.

  • Specifically, the Aircrack-ng suite consists of tools such as airodump-ng, aireplay-ng, aircrack-ng, and airdecap-ng. in,

  • Airodump-ng can be used to capture raw 802.11 packets.

  • Airplay-ng can be used to inject frames into wireless traffic.
  • Once enough packets are captured, Aircrack-ng will crack WEP and WPA-PSK keys.
  • Airdecap-ng can be used both to decrypt captured files and to strip wireless headers.

Applicability – Very suitable for penetration testers to invade Wi-Fi networks through customization and command line methods.

Proprietary - Open source tool provided by GNU (General Public License).

Supported platforms - Linux, OS X Solaris and Windows.

4. Wireshark

As an essential network protocol analyzer, Wireshark can be widely used to capture real-time network traffic and troubleshoot issues such as latency issues, data packet loss, and malicious activity in the network. At the same time, it allows testers to intercept and analyze data passing over the network and convert it into a readable format.

The main function:

  • Wireshark enables in-depth inspection of a variety of protocols.
  • It comes with a standard three-pane packet browser and powerful display filters.
  • Wireshark allows users to browse data through the GUI, or through the TTY mode TShark tool.
  • It can read and write files in different formats, including: tcpdump (libpcap), Pcap NG, Catapult DCT2000, Cisco Secure IDS iplog, Microsoft Network Monitor, Network GeneralSniffer® (compressed and uncompressed), etc.
  • The tool provides decryption support for different protocols including IPsec, ISAKMP, Kerberos, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, WEP and WPA/WPA2.
  • The tool also allows users to inspect VOIP type traffic.

Applicability - Most suitable for network troubleshooters to analyze the security posture of sensitive data in the network through penetration testing.

Proprietary - Open source tool provided by GNU (General Public License).

Supported platforms – macOS, Linux, Solaris and Windows.

5. Nmap

As an open source penetration testing tool, Nmap can not only help identify open ports and vulnerabilities in the network, but also determine the active devices (or hosts) running on the network.

The main function:

  • NMAP can not only use the port scanning function to enumerate open ports; it can also use the version detection engine to determine the service name and application version number running on the identified port.
  • It contains more than 2900 OS "fingerprints" that can be used to determine the target host's operating system.
  • Although primarily a command line tool, NMAP also provides a GUI version called Zenmap GUI.
  • Nmap's scripting engine comes with more than 170 NSE scripts and 20 software libraries, including: firewall-bypass, super ipmi-conf, oracle-brute-stealth and ssl-heartbleed.
  • By providing better support for IPv6, it can be used in classless inter-domain routing style (CIDR-style) address ranges, idle resource scanning, parallel reverse DNS, and more NSE (Nmap scripting Engine) script coverage , provides comprehensive network scanning.
  • NMAP provides advanced scanning functions such as bypassing firewalls or WAFs, which can assist penetration testers in bypassing the security devices already installed in the network.

Applicability – It is considered by penetration testers to be the best tool for identifying network-level vulnerabilities.

Proprietary - Open source tool provided by GNU (General Public License).

Supported platforms - Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, NetBSD, Sun OS and Amiga.

6. Metasploit

As a penetration testing framework, Metasploit is widely used by cyber attackers and ethical hackers. Currently, the Metasploit project has two versions: the open source sub-project Metasploit Framework and the licensed version Metasploit Pro. Among them, Metasploit Framework can develop executable code and payloads for remote target computers. In addition to using the default command line interface, testers also purchased Metasploit Pro to obtain various advanced features and a GUI-based operating experience.

The main function:

  • Metasploit includes more than 1,600 exploits for 25 platforms.

  • The tool comes with around 500+ payloads including:

  • The command shell can run various scripts against the host through the payload.

  • Dynamic payloads can be generated separately to evade antivirus software.
  • Meterpreter's payload can control the device's display, sessions, and file uploads and downloads.

  • Static payloads can be used for port forwarding and communication between networks.

  • Metasploit provides a post-exploitation module that can be used for in-depth penetration testing. These modules allow penetration testers to gather more information about the exploited system, such as hash dumps, or enumeration of services.

Suitability – Suitable for testing multiple applications or systems simultaneously.

All parties - Rapid7.

Supported Platforms - It comes pre-installed in Kali Linux OS, and is also supported on Windows and macOS.

7.Hashcat

Hashcat is an open source tool widely used in the hacker and ethical hacking communities. Hashing algorithms are known to transform readable data into garbled code, making it difficult to decipher directly. Hashcat is able to guess the password of the target system, hash it, and then compare the resulting hash with the hash it is trying to crack. If the hashes match, the crack is considered successful. Hashes here include: WHIRLPOOL, RiceMD, NTMLv1, NTLMv2 MD5, SHA, etc.

The main function:

  • Fast, efficient and comprehensive.
  • Hashcat can both crack multiple hashes at the same time and configure and execute the number of threads based on the lowest priority.
  • It supports automated performance tuning through Markov chains ordered by the key space.
  • The tool comes with a built-in benchmarking system and integrated thermal watchdog.
  • Allows users to implement more than 300 hashcats.
  • Supports hexadecimal character set (hex-charset) and hexadecimal salt (hex-salt).
  • Supports distributed network cracking, and more than 200 different hash formats.

Suitability - Best suited for system recovery experts and penetration testers to crack encrypted passwords.

Proprietary – Open source tool provided by MIT license.

Supported platforms – Linux, OS X and Windows.

8. WPScan

As an open source WordPress security scanner, WPScan can scan WordPress for known vulnerabilities in core, plugins, and themes. WPScan is built with a Ruby application. It maintains an up-to-date database of WordPress platform vulnerabilities and can both scan target environments for vulnerabilities and execute simple commands such as “wpsc

The main function:

  • It can enumerate active users on a WordPress site.
  • Ability to identify and detect publicly available wp-config.php backup files, as well as files exported from other databases.
  • Can assist in detecting and cracking various weak passwords through WPScan password dictionary or through force transmission.
  • WPScan can both enumerate version information of themes and plugins running on WordPress sites and provide vulnerability information related to identified versions.
  • Provides exposed error logs, media file enumeration, vulnerable Timthumb files, upload directory listings, and exposed full paths.

Suitability - Its plugin can be quickly installed and run on a WordPress site or using a Docker image.

Owner - Open source tool, available on GitHub repository.

Supported platforms – ArchLinux, Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian.

9. Nessus

As a powerful and popular network vulnerability scanner, Nessus has an extensive library of vulnerability signatures. By running on the target host, Nessus can not only identify running services and detect related vulnerabilities, but also provide information on what is being exploited and how to fix it.

Nessus scanners improve the security posture of target systems and ensure better compliance in virtual and cloud environments. Typically, Nessus Essentials allows users to scan target environments within 16 IP addresses for free to meet enterprise requirements for speed and accuracy.

The main function:

  • Compared with other vulnerability assessment tools, Nessus supports more technologies and more comprehensive testing.
  • It quickly discovers target assets, supports configuration auditing, and detects target configuration files and malware.
  • By scanning against credentials, it can detect vulnerabilities such as missing credentials and patches on the target system.
  • The tool also supports the discovery of sensitive data and can assist with vulnerability analysis.
  • Nessus comes with the largest and continuously updated vulnerability library.
  • The tool can email users scan results and repair recommendations in the form of flexible and customizable reports.

Applicability – Suitable for scanning running network devices, hypervisors, databases, tablets, web servers, phones, and other critical infrastructure.

Owner - Tenable

Supported Platforms - Runs on Debian, MacOS, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Windows, Oracle and Linux.

10.MobSF

MobSF (Mobile Security Framework) is a comprehensive all-in-one framework that can be used for penetration testing, malware analysis, and security assessment of mobile applications on different platforms. It can be used for both static analysis and dynamic analysis. Currently, MobSF can support mobile application binary files including: APK, XAPK, IPA and APPX. At the same time, it also has a built-in API to provide external integration.

The main function:

  • As an open source tool, MobSF integrates seamlessly with CI/CD or DevSecOps pipelines.
  • Because it supports automated static analysis of mobile applications, it can discover critical vulnerabilities by analyzing source code or binary files.
  • Because it supports dynamic analysis on real devices or emulators, it can scan applications and analyze access to sensitive data to discover various hard-coded information and insecure requests.
  • It can help identify vulnerabilities related to mobile applications such as XXE, SSRF, path traversal and IDOR.

Applicability – Being an optimal automation framework, MobSF can be used to scan various mobile applications.

Proprietary – It is an open source tool and can be downloaded for free.

Supported platforms - Android, iOS and Windows.

11.John the Ripper Password Cracker

As the name suggests, John the Ripper (JTR) is a password cracking and recovery tool that can help discover and even publish weak passwords on your system. It was originally designed to test password strength through dictionary attacks, and to brute force various encrypted/hashed passwords. Currently, JTR is one of the most popular tools among the penetration tester community. It can use multiple modes to speed up the password cracking process.

The main function:

  • This tool can crack different password hashes based on: crypt password hash type, Kerberos Andrew File System (Kerberos AFS) hash, MD-4 dependent password hash, Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 LM type hash. password.
  • JTR can divide attacks into three main categories: dictionary attacks, brute force attacks and Rainbow tables.
  • It not only provides three modes: single crack, word list and incremental, but also allows users to customize configuration files, this external mode.

Suitability - JTR is an excellent password security audit and recovery tool that is best suited for beginners and technical experts alike.

Proprietary – Open source tool provided by the GNU (General Public License), the professional version of which is proprietary.

Supported Platforms - Although this tool was originally developed for Unix, it currently runs on 15 different platforms.

summary

To sum up, the 11 penetration testing tools introduced in this article have their own advantages and disadvantages in network, web and mobile applications. You can choose different types of tools as needed based on actual needs and target architecture to identify vulnerabilities more easily and efficiently and improve the security posture of the target system.

Original title: 11 Popular Penetration Testing Tools, Author: Cyril James

[51CTO translation, please indicate the original translator and source for reprinting on cooperative sites: 51CTO.com]