What is a penetration test?
Penetration testing (or pentesting) is a simulated cyberattack that professional ethical hackers do before attackers by breaking into corporate networks to find vulnerabilities.
Like in the movie Sneakers, where hackers break into your corporate networks to find weaknesses before attackers. It is a simulated cyberattack where a pentester or ethical hacker uses tools and techniques available to malicious hackers.
What is a penetration test? 11 Best Tools for Penetration Testing
Why You Need to Do a Pentest
Again, pentesting shows where and how a malicious attacker could exploit your network. This allows you to mitigate any weaknesses before an actual attack takes place.
According to the latest research from Positive Technologies, almost every company has weaknesses that attackers can exploit. In 93% of cases, pentesters were able to cross the perimeter of the mesh and reach the network. The average time needed to do this was four days. In 71% of companies, an unskilled hacker could break into the intranet. How to become a penetration tester?
Best pentest tools
In the old days, hacking was difficult and required a lot of manual tampering. But today, a complete suite of automated testing tools turns hackers into cyborgs, computer-aided humans who can test more than ever before.
Why use a horse and carriage to cross the country when you can fly in a jet plane? Here is a list of supersonic tools that make the job of a modern pentester faster, better and smarter.
1. Kali Linux
If you are not using Kali as your basic pentesting operating system, you are either extremely knowledgeable and a specific use case or you are doing it wrong. Kali, formerly known as BackTrack Linux and maintained by good people at Offensive Security (OffSec, the people who run the OSCP certificate), has been optimized in every way as a penetration tester for aggressive use.
Although you can run Kali on their own hardware, it is much more common to see pentesters using Kali virtual machines in OS X or Windows.
Kali comes with most of the tools mentioned here and is the default pentest operating system for most use cases. Be warned though – Kali is optimized for offense, not defense, and in turn can be easily exploited. Don’t store your super-deceived extra secret files on your Kali VM. Is ‘Brute Force Attack’ legal or illegal?
2.nmap
The ancestor of port scanners, nmap – short for network mapper – is a tried and true pen testing tool that few can live without. Which ports are open? What works on these ports? This is indispensable information for the pentester during the discovery phase, and nmap is often the best tool for the job.
Nmap (“Network Mapper”) is an open source tool for network discovery and security auditing. It is designed to quickly scan large networks, although it works well against single hosts. Nmap uses raw IP packets with new methods to determine which hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) these hosts offer, what operating systems (and operating system versions) they run, what kind of packet filters / firewalls. in use and dozens of other features. While Nmap is commonly used for security audits, many system and network administrators find it useful for routine tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime.
Despite the occasional hysteria from a non-technical C-suite manager that an unknown party is harboring the business, nmap alone is perfectly legal to use and is like knocking on everyone’s front door in the neighborhood. home.
Many legitimate organizations, such as insurance agents, internet mappers such as Shodan and Censys, and risk scorers such as BitSight, regularly scan the entire IPv4 series with dedicated port scanning software (usually nmap competitors mass scanning or zmap) both to map the public safety posture of large businesses and small. However, malicious attackers also do port scanning, so it’s something that will be logged for future reference. How does the SQLMap penetration test tool work?
3. Metasploit
Why exploit when you can meta-sploit? This appropriately named meta-software is like a crossbow: aim at your target, select your exploit, pick a loadout and shoot. A must for most pentesters, metasploit automates the large amount of previously cumbersome effort and is truly “the world’s most used penetration testing framework”, as is the case with website trumpets. Metasploit, an open source project with the commercial support of Rapid7, is a must-have project for defenders to protect their systems from attackers. What are the best tools for testing IoT devices?
4. Wireshark
Wireshark doo doo doo doo doo doo … now that we hacked your brain to hum that melody (did you see how easy this interaction was?), This network protocol analyzer will be more catchy. Wireshark is a ubiquitous tool for understanding traffic passing through your network. While Wireshark is widely used for in-depth study of your daily TCP / IP connection problems, it supports the analysis of hundreds of protocols, including real-time analysis and decryption support for most of these protocols. If you are new to pentesting, Wireshark is a tool to learn.
5.John the Ripper
Unlike the software’s namesake, John will not seriously kill people in Victorian London, but instead will gladly crack encryption as fast as your GPU can go. This password cracker is open source and intended for offline password cracking. John can use a word list of possible passwords and include them with “a” and “@” and “s” with “5” and so on. Or it can work forever with muscular hardware until a password is found. Thinking that the vast majority of people use short passwords with little complexity, John is generally good at cracking encryption.
6. Hashcat
Hashcat is the world’s fastest CPU-based password recovery tool. While not as fast as its GPU counterpart, oclHashcat, large lists can easily be split in half with a good glossary and some knowledge of command switches.
Hashcat is the world’s fastest self-proclaimed CPU-based password recovery tool. Examples of Hashcat supported hash algorithms are Microsoft LM Hashes, MD4, MD5, SHA family, Unix Crypt formats, MySQL, Cisco PIX.
Pentesting often involves the stealing of hash passwords, and taking advantage of these credentials means taking a program like hashcat offline in the hopes of guessing or roughing at least some of those passwords.
Hashcat works best on a modern GPU (sorry, Kali VM users). The old hashcat still supports CPU hash cracking, but warns users that your graphics card is significantly slower than taking advantage of the processing power.
7. Hydra
John the Ripper’s friend Hydra kicks in when you need to crack an online password such as SSH or FTP login, IMAP, IRC, RDP and much more. Point the Hydra at the service you want to crack, give a word list if you want, and pull the trigger. Tools like Hydra are a reminder that speed-limiting password attempts and disconnecting users after a handful of login attempts can be successful defenses against attackers. What is the best security testing tool (open source)?
8.The Burp Suite
No discussion of pentesting tools is complete without mentioning the web vulnerability scanner Burp Suite. Burp Suite is neither free nor free, but an expensive tool used by professionals, unlike other tools mentioned so far. While it’s a Burp Suite community version, it lacks most of the functionality, and the Burp Suite enterprise version goes for $ 3,999 a year (that psychological pricing doesn’t make it much cheaper, guys).
Yet there is a reason they can avoid such nosebleed prices. Burp Suite is an incredibly effective web vulnerability scanner. Point at the web property you want to test and fire when ready. Burp rival Nessus offers a similarly effective (and similarly priced) product.
9.Zed Attack Proxy
Those who do not have the money to pay for a copy of the Burp Suite will find OWASP’s Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) almost equally effective and it is both free and free software. As the name suggests, ZAP sits between your browser and the website you are testing and allows you to block traffic (man in the middle) to review and modify. It lacks many of Burp’s bells and whistles, but its open source license makes it easier and cheaper to scale, and is a good starting tool to find out how vulnerable web traffic really is. ZAP competitor Nikto offers a similar open source tool.
10.sqlmap
Did someone say SQL injection? Hello, sqlmap. This incredibly effective SQL injection tool is open source and as the website says “automates the process of detecting and using SQL injection flaws and taking over database servers”. Supports all usual targets including Sqlmap, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, IBM DB2, SQLite, Firebird, Sybase, SAP MaxDB, Informix, HSQLDB and H2. Old schedulers had to do their SQL injections with a hot needle into their hard drive. These days sqlmap will take the cross-eyed business out of your pentesting business.
11.air breaking
It can recover the WEP key when enough encrypted packets are captured with airodump-ng. This part of the Aircrack-ng package determines the WEP key using two basic methods. The first method is through the PTW approach (Pyshkin, Tews, Weinmann). The main advantage of the PTW approach is that very few data packets are required to break the WEP key. The second method is the FMS / KoreK method.
The FMS / KoreK method includes various statistical attacks to discover the WEP key and uses them in combination with rough enforcement.
In addition, the program provides a dictionary method for determining the WEP key. A word list (file or stdin) or an airolib-ng must be used to crack WPA / WPA2 preshared keys.
some credit goes to cssonline.com
I hope you enjoyed this post, then you should never forget to share this post.
Thank you so much 🙂
– Hacking Truth, Kumar Atul Jaiswal