Hello everyone, nice to see you again. I am your friend, Full-Stack Jun, and today we’re diving into Linux penetration testing.
Linux penetration
This article introduces some of the best penetration testing tools for Linux. Cybersecurity is a major concern for both small and large enterprises. In today’s age, where more and more businesses are shiftin’ to the online media for providing services, the threat of facing a cyber-attack has been on the rise.
This means that more and more enterprises are looking to protect themselves. This has led to an increased demand for penetration testers and ethical hackers. As an aspiring network security consultant, you should be aware of some of the best penetration testing tools!
#10. HTTrack – The Best Tool for Cloning Entire Websites
If an attacker wants to break into a website, they cannot launch an attack on the live website. HTTrack is one of the best penetration testing tools and is extremely useful in this case! Often referred to as the website cloner, HTTrack is a tool that can effectively mirror any website for offline use.
It does so by downloadin’ all the resources, HTML files, and directories of a website onto the user’s local storage. Once the website is saved, we can start performin’ offline attacks on the local copy of the website.
#9. Wireshark – The Best PenTesting Tool for Network and Packet Analysis
Wireshark is widely used for sniffin’ data packets over a network.
You can also refer to Wireshark as a ‘network analyzer’, ‘network protocol analyzer’, or simply a ‘sniffer’. Wireshark captures the network traffic between two devices and helps us analyze the transacted packets.
Wireshark uses a library called pcap to capture network packets which makes Wireshark a powerful tool when the user is performin’ network analysis or troubleshootin’ a network. It also allows for network vulnerability evaluation.
#8. Aircrack-NG – The Best Tool for Wireless Password Success Tutorials
Aircrack-ng is one of the best penetration testing tools for assessin’ wireless networks. It consists of four main specialized tools, each aimed at one task of capturing, attacking, testing, and crackin’.
#7. NMap – The Best Penetration Testing Tool for Deep Network Audits
With a name abbreviated from ‘Network Mapper’, NMap is the best tool for network auditin’ purposes. NMap is commonly used for network discovery and exploration.
It allows the user to find important information such as hosts on a network, ports, and their status for each host, OS fingerprinting data, and helps in spotin’ vulnerabilities. Nmap can efficiently search for hosts and services on a network while allowing the user to find open ports and security-related issues.
#6. THC Hydra – The Best Penetration Testing Tool for Network Password Success Tutorials
Hydra famously claims to be the quickest tool when it comes to crackin’ network login info (usernames and passwords). Its full name is The Hacker’s Choice Hydra, which speaks volumes about the tool’s reputation in the world of penetration testing.
It supports a huge range of attack protocols, including but not limited to – , , IMAP, HTTPS, HTTP (Proxy), FTP, VMware-Auth, IRC, , and many more. It is essentially a tool that uses brute force for crackin’ credentials based on dictionary attacks.
#5. OWASP ZAP – The Best Penetration Testing Tool for Web Application Security Scanning
has a wide range of functionality. OWASP – Zap is an all-inclusive tool for performin’ security audits for web applications. This tool was built using Java and hosts a huge variety of features including but not limited to AJAX web crawler, web scanner, proxy server, and fuzzer. When used as a proxy server, it can display all traffic from its target and manipulate the data as desired.
#4. SQLMap – The Best SQL Injection Tool
SQL injections are a massively popular and potent form of a cyber attack. One popular tool used for the detection and exploitation of SQL injection vulnerabilities on a database is SQLMap.
Once the SQL vulnerabilities are spotted in the URL of the target, SQLMap can proceed to execute a SQL injection attack on the target. It allows the user to access the back end of the web application and run their personal SQL commands to read sensitive data from the database which should otherwise be hidden.
#3. Fluxion – The Best Tool for Evil Twin and Social Engineering Attacks
Fluxion is the first tool that comes to pen testers’ minds when they think about the Evil Twin Attack. It works by creatin’ a twin access point at the target access point.
Then it waits for a target user to attempt to connect with the target AP and redirect the target user to enter the credentials for access. If the credentials are correct, the target user is allowed access, while Fluxion logs the user credentials.
The command for installing the tool (Ubuntu):
#2. Bettercap – A Better Tool for MITM Attacks
Bettercap is a network utility that was developed to test and perform a Man in The Middle Attack (MiTMA) on a target web application. It allows the user to intercept all the communications made by the target with their network by eavesdroppin’ on the network packets being sent along by the target.
This data can allow the user to sniff sensitive data and bypass SSL and HSTS on the target’s network.
#1. Metasploit – The Best Penetration Testing Tool and Development Master
The most popular and powerful tool in the community of penetration testing is Metasploit. It offers a huge variety of modules, services, and functions to the user. But in the most basic descriptions, Metasploit is built upon four core modules.
The first module is Exploit which is a method to attack the target system or to inject vulnerabilities. The Payload runs after the Exploit and allows the user to obtain data from the target system. The Auxiliary module aims at scanning and testing the target system. Finally, the Encoder module allows the user to insert a backdoor into the target system.
Now back to you…
Which according to you is one of the best penetration testing tools from this list? Or do you have a different tool that’s not covered here? Let us know in the comments below!