Only 7 Pentesting Tools You Will Ever Need

So we had to ask ourselves if we only could use just a few pentesting tools lets say 7 what would be those tools we would have to have to conduct any pentest out of all the rest.  We have our 7 see if you agree or what you would switch out.

In 2018, the average cost of cyber-crime increased by a whopping 27%, as reported by Accenture. The rise hasn’t stopped ever since. In such trying times, being preemptive and preventive, when it comes to cybersecurity, is paramount. Even if you think that you have a rigorous enough security infrastructure in place, you shouldn’t rest on your laurels. Keeping up your network’s defenses against the constantly evolving modern hacker, is a never-ending process. Running malware and vulnerability scans periodically help you identify flaws, but to an extent. To go the extra mile, you have to actually simulate potential attacks on your network, and see how well-equipped it is to fight off the most sophisticated intrusion attempts. This process of trying to breach your own defenses (without incurring any costs) is known as penetration testing (or pentesting).

Pentesting is a great way of identifying potential vulnerabilities before they are discovered by hackers. Today, we even have some sophisticated, automated penetration testing tools that make it easy to perform penetration testing. So, if you are a small business owner with not too much money to spare, fret not, as what follows is a list of the best penetration testing tools available right now:

Nmap (The Network Mapper)

Arguably the most important part of a pentesting effort is the vulnerability scanning, and Nmap helps you with that. It’s completely free and open-source. Using it, you can scan the most important components of a network, including hosts, installed operating systems, firewalls, and running services etc. Nmap is as good for huge enterprise networks, as it’s for a personal computer.

In addition to providing the tester with a vivid understanding of the target network, it also lets them monitor uptime/downtime of a service or host. It is easy-to-use, heavily documented, and even comes with a GUI (Zenmap). Best of all, it supports almost all famous operating systems, including Windows, Solaris, Mac, NetBSD, Ubuntu and more.

Find more about Nmap here.

Metasploit

Metasploit is one of the most powerful penetration testing tools available today. It’s completely open source and has been getting contributions from developers and security experts for years now. It has an extensive set of vulnerability detection features, including vulnerability validation, tracking real-time statistics, and sharing validation results with Nexpose.

Metasploit has a very extensive documentation that can be helpful for beginners and experts alike. Its exploit feature lets you choose the hosts you want to exploit, opt from a variety of payload options, collect evidence from live sessions, perform transport evasion, and even run multiple exploits currently.

Know more about Metasploit here.

Aircrack-ng

Aircrack-ng offers a comprehensive suite of Wi-Fi network security assessment features. From allowing you to capture packets and export them to text files for further processing, to performing attacks like fake access points, deauthentication, and replay attacks; it does it all. Moreover, you can also use it to crack WPA PSK and WEP keys. Aircrack-ng is also open-source and available for the Windows platform. The documentation is not as extensive as some of the other tools we have mentioned, but it can still help you get started.

Get to know Aircrack-ng more here.

Wireshark

Almost every developer has used Wireshark at some point in their career. It’s incredibly powerful and lets you monitor all the traffic that goes through your network. You can filter based on transport layer protocol, contained AVPs, packet size, and source and destination ports and IP addresses.

The best part about Wireshark is that it lets you go deep. Information about all layers (network, application, transport) is available for all the packets. You can also identify relationships between packets, e.g. which packet was sent in response to a specific request packet.

Know all there is about Wireshark here.

Nessus

Nessus is a paid vulnerability assessment tool which is well-designed and easy to use. It supports more than 47,000 CVEs (common vulnerabilities and exposures), which is way more than any other product in the market. It comes with a lot of pre-built templates which make it easy to get started with it. With the simple click of a button, you can get access to features like cloud infrastructure audit, bash shellshock detection, internal PCI network scan, mobile device scan, offline config audit, shadow brokers scan, and much more.

The vulnerability management tool on Nessus is very intuitive. You can choose to snooze off vulnerabilities, group them based on different factors, and set severity levels as you see fit.

You can learn more about the product here.

John the Ripper

Nothing breaches security more than weak passwords. After all, if you know the administrator password to a server, nobody can stop you from wreaking as much havoc on it as you want. This is why penetration testing often involves a lot of password cracking. For this purpose, John the Ripper is widely used by pentesters (and hackers) around the world.

It offers a comprehensive packaging of the most sophisticated password cracking tools in the world. It supports different password hash types and ciphers including (but not limited to) crypt (3), Kerberos/AFS, DES-based tripcodes, and Windows LM hashes. You can install John on Windows, DOS, and most flavors of Unix. The package also includes a lot of huge password and dictionary files, which you can pass to john as an input (you can also create your own files too of course).

Find all about John the Ripper here.

Burp Suite

Burp Suite is a vulnerability scanning and exploitation tool, made byPortSwigger Ltd. It can help you identify a ridiculous potential vulnerabilities, including SQL injection, cross side scripting, guessable credentials, and unhandled exceptions etc.

With Burp, you can inject payload into any part of the HTTP request; this includes the POST data, query string, URL path, and the cookies. It runs on many famous Linux distributions, Mac OS, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.

Visit the official Burp documentation here.

Final Word:

You can never be too careful when it comes to cybersecurity; especially in a world where more sophisticated ways of hacking are being discovered every day. Penetration testing is a great way to introspect, examine, and mitigate potential security risks within a system. In the article above, we mentioned some of the top penetration testing tools that can come in handy for anyone, regardless of their level of experience.

Cyberwarfare

Cyberwarfare is computer- or network-based conflict involving politically motivated attacks by a nation-state on another nation-state. In these types of attacks, nation-state actors attempt to disrupt the activities of organizations or nation-states, especially for strategic or military purposes and cyberespionage.

Although cyberwarfare generally refers to cyberattacks perpetrated by one nation-state on another, it can also describe attacks by terrorist groups or hacker groups aimed at furthering the goals of particular nations. It can be difficult to definitively attribute cyberattacks to a nation-state when those attacks are carried out by advanced persistent threat (APT) actors, but such attacks can often be linked to specific nations. While there are a number of examples of suspect cyberwarfare attacks in recent history, there has been no formal, agreed-upon definition for a cyber "act of war," which experts generally agree would be a cyberattack that directly leads to loss of life.

Cyberwarfare can take many forms, including:

• viruses, computer worms and malware that can take down water supplies, transportation systems, power grids, critical infrastructure and military systems;
• denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, cybersecurity events that occur when attackers take action that prevents legitimate users from accessing targeted computer systems, devices or other network resources;
• hacking and theft of critical data from institutions, governments and businesses; and
• ransomware that holds computer systems hostage until the victims pay ransom.

Objectives of cyberwarfare

According to Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the goal of those engaged in cyberwarfare is to “weaken, disrupt or destroy countries.” To achieve their goals, “national cyber warfare programs are unique in posing a threat along the entire spectrum of objectives that might harm national interests. These threats range from propaganda to espionage and serious disruption with loss of life and extensive infrastructure disruption.  A few examples of threats include:

• Espionage for technology advancement. For example, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) in its 2018 Foreign Economic Espionage in Cyberspace report notes that China’s cybersecurity law mandates that foreign companies submit their technology to the Chinese government for review and that Russia has increased its demand of source code reviews to approve of foreign technology sold in their country. In 2018, the US Department of Justice charged two Chinese hackers associated with the Ministry of State Security with targeting intellectual property and confidential business information.

Disruption of infrastructure to attack the nation states or, when attacked by a country, to damage the ability of that country to continue its attacks. For example, by controlling a router between supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) sensors and controllers in a critical infrastructure, such as the energy sector, an enemy can attempt to destroy or badly damage energy plants or the grid itself.

Cyber attacks are also used to sow discord to destabilize government. For example, according to Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III, Russia’s Internet Research Agency “used social media accounts and interest groups to sow discord in the U.S. political system through what it termed ‘information warfare.’ The campaign evolved from a generalized program designed in 2014 and 2015 to undermine the U.S. electoral system, to a targeted operation that by early 2016 favored candidate Trump and disparaged candidate Clinton.”

Types of cyberwarfare attacks

Increasingly, cybercriminals are attacking governments through their critical infrastructure, including transportation systems, banking systems, power grids, water supplies, dams, hospitals and critical manufacturing.

The threat of cyberwarfare attacks grows as a nation's critical systems are increasingly connected to the internet. Even if these systems can be properly secured, they can still be hacked by perpetrators recruited by nation-states to find weaknesses and exploit them.

APT attacks on infrastructure can devastate a country. For example, attacks on a nation's utility systems can wreak havoc by causing widespread power outages, but an attacker with access to hydropower grids could also conceivably cause flooding by opening dams.

Cyberattacks on a government's computer systems can be used to support conventional warfare efforts. Such attacks can prevent government officials from communicating with one another; enable attackers to steal secret communications; or release employee and citizen personal data, such as Social Security numbers and tax information, to the public.

Nation-state-sponsored or military-sponsored attackers might also hack the military databases of their enemies to get information on troop locations, as well as what kind of weapons and equipment they're using.

DoS attacks, which continue to increase around the world, are expected to be leveraged for waging cyberwarfare. Attackers are using distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack methods to hit government entities with massive sustained bandwidth attacks, and at the same time infecting them with spyware and malware to steal or destroy data. These attacks may inject misinformation into the networks of their targets to create chaos, outages or scandals.

Introduction

Dear Readers,

This blog will talk more on national security, cyber security, counterintelligence, tools (hacking & defense) review.

Anything information, analysis, tool usage shared on this blog is for strictly education purposes. The author will not be held responsible for misuse of these content.

What motivated me to write this blog is that Ghana is far away from what is going on in the cyber-world. Countries have recruited cyber unit for offensive, destructive, and defensive purposes. These are sometimes state actors (spies) looking to wreak other nations, the come in as consultants to help fragile countries and they plant backdoors.

My plead to government is to stop bringing in consultant or nation who want to help build sensitive infrastructure with their money and also government officials should be security conscious when receiving envoys as they always come with two or more secret service officials with specialty in cyber warfare. Avoid using their flash drives on your computers and verify any emails received from them it can be backdoor.

Government should use consultants in the country and stop allowing some few individual parading as cyber expert to government and blocking other expert to help security our cyber space. The national cyber security center was established base on a wish list sent to the president of the republic Ghana on assumption of duty by some consultants.

Cyber defense is a shared responsibility.

My first challenge for my readers crack the cipher in the picture and send a mail with you answer to my email and win a prize ( GH¢200 Voucher from ShopRite)

Long live Ghana the land of our birth.