Ethical hacking is also known as penetration testing. It is an act of finding the vulnerabilities and threats that can become the cause of the loss of data or financial information in the systems. The main purpose of ethical hacking is to improve the security of the systems. The ethical hackers use the methods and techniques of malicious hackers. The only difference is that they use these methods and techniques with the permission of the authorized person. Their main purpose is to improve the security of the systems by finding and removing all the vulnerabilities and threats. Here, we will discuss some free tools that you can use for ethical hacking.
It is a free open source hacking tool for ethical hackers. The ethical hackers can use this tool to scan ports and map networks. Most of the security professionals are using this tool for various purposes. They are using it for network inventory. It is helpful for them to check the open ports. They can also use it to monitor the uptime of the service or host. It is also the best tool for ethical hackers for security audits. With the help of this tool, hackers can creatively perform the security audits. It determines various things by using raw IP packets. By using these raw IP packets creatively, they try to know the services of the hosts, their operating systems and their versions of the firewalls. The interface of this tool is easy to use for ethical hackers.
Fiddler:
It is a free proxy server application. This tool has lots of features. These features are helpful for ethical hackers in various ways. You can run this free tool on almost all the systems. By using this tool, the users can debug the web traffic on almost all the systems. According to ethical hackers, this is the best tool for them to decrypt and intercept the HTTPS traffic. While decrypting and intercepting the HTTPS traffic, the users can easily identify the vulnerabilities. By removing these vulnerabilities, they can save the websites from the attack of the hackers.
Wireshark:
It is a web vulnerability scanner tool. The ethical hackers are using this tool as an industry-standard protocol. The ethical hackers can capture the data packets within the network from this tool. After capturing this data, they display the data to the end-users. This data is available to the end-users in the human-readable form. The ethical hackers can capture this data in various ways like Wi-Fi, Ethernet and Bluetooth etc. The USBCAP feature of this tool allows ethical hackers to capture the data from the USB-attached networks. You can also use this ethical hacking network in the console version. The console version of this network is known as t-shark.
Nikto:
It is a web vulnerability scanner tool for ethical hackers. This open-source free tool is very famous among the ethical hackers’ community. If you want to run it against a host, Nikto will provide multiple options to you. You can use it to find various potential web vulnerabilities. You can use it to find server misconfiguration. You can use it to find insecure host files and programs. You can also use it to find out of date programs that can create some problems for your website. This is also the best tool to find out the version-specific issues. After finding these version-specific issues, you should resolve these issues immediately because these issues can create problems for the host.
John the Ripper:
John the Ripper is a very famous password cracking tool for ethical hackers. The malicious hackers use some other tools to crack the passwords of your accounts. After cracking the passwords, they use your accounts for illegal activities. On the other hand, ethical hackers use this tool to crack the passwords after getting permission from the concerned person. Its reason is that they have forgotten the passwords and they want to recover these passwords. This is also the best tool to find out the weak password vulnerabilities in a network. It can also work as an offline password cracker. The support of the brute force and rainbow crack attack increases the importance of this tool.
OpenVAS:
Recommended by a top dissertation help provider, It is an open-source and free vulnerability scanner tool for ethical hackers. This essential ethical hacking tool is just similar to Nessus. With the help of the free version of the Nessus, you can use it only for the non-enterprise environments. On the other hand, its paid version is available for enterprise environments. To use its paid version, you will have to pay $2,000 per year. On the other hand, OpenVAS is a free tool for ethical hackers. With the help of this free tool, you can easily perform the vulnerability scans. After performing the vulnerability scans, you can also create the exportable reports. With the help of these reports, you can create comprehensive strategies to secure the websites.
Aircrack-ng
It is a wireless password cracking tool. With the help of this free tool, the ethical hackers can easily crack the wireless passwords which are using raw monitoring mode. By enabling its monitor mode, you can capture the network traffic. After capturing enough data, it runs cracking algorithms. With the help of cracking algorithms, this essential tool can recover WPA and WEP keys. To perform these functions, it uses lots of tools. These tools are Airsnort-ng, Airplay-ng and Airdecap-ng.
THC Hydra:
It is also an essential and popular password cracking tool. This essential tool has an active and experienced team of developers. Therefore, this tool can crack the password immediately. If you want to crack the password of a specific log-in page, this essential tool will use brute-force. With the help of the brute-force, this essential tool will try to use various passwords and log-in combinations to crack the passwords. You can also use it as a rapid dictionary attack against various protocols. You can use it as a rapid dictionary attack up to 50 protocols at a time.
