Security utilities and hacking tools make lives easier today. We do not need to put ourselves in a lot of rush. Just download the tool and let it do all the work. This page has the top 15 hacking tools and security tools for free download. On this page, we shall include hacking tools for Windows and Linux and security utilities with direct download links for ethical hackers and penetration testers.
15 Best Hacking Tools and Security Utilities for Hackers (Free Download)
Following are the best most reliable and working hacking tools that one can get today for penetration testing and security:
Nessus Remote Security Scanner
The Nessus remote security scanner comes in free. It went closed source recently. It works with the client-server framework. The Nessus remote is very popular worldwide. It is a vulnerability scanner that is used in more than 75 thousand organizations. Most of the world’s organizations are using Nessus to audit business-critical enterprise apps and devices for significant cost savings.
Download Nessus Remote Security Scanner
Nmap – Network Scanning Tool
Today almost everyone has heard about Nmap. It has recently gone within the 4.x series. Nmap is a network mapper. It is used for security auditing and network exploration. It comes in freely. It is designed in a way to scan vast networks though it works fine against single hosts.
Raw IP packets are used by Nmap in a novel to see what hosts are available on the network, what services are going to be offered by the host, what OS versions are they running on, what type of packet filters or firewalls are being used, and many other characteristics.
Nmap can run on many computer systems and carries both the console and graphical versions. The best part about Nmap is that it can be used by beginners (-sT) as well as pros (-packer_trace). Once you fully understand the results of Nmap, you will know how versatile a tool it is.
SEE ALSO: Hacking Cheat Sheet for Ethical Hackers and Security Professionals.
Nikto – Web Server Hacker
Nikto is an open-source (GPL) web scanner. It can perform comprehensive tests against the web servers for different items which include over 3200 entirely dangerous CGIs or files, versions having more than 625 servers, and version-specific programs having more than 230 servers. If desired the plugins and scan items can be updated frequently and updated automatically as well.
Nikto comes in as a good CGI scanner. There are other tools present that go great with Nikto.
John the Ripper – Password Hacking Tool
John, the ripper, is considered as the fasted password cracking tool. It is currently available in many flavors of UNIX (11 are supported officially, not counting different architectures), BeOS, Win32, DOS ad Open VMS.
The primary purpose of this tool is to detect weak UNIX passwords. In spite, many of the crypt (3) types of password hash the one found most commonly on different UNIX flavors and are supported out of the box include windows NT, 2000, XP, 2003, LM hashes, Kerberos AFS, and many others with contributed patches.
Download John The Ripper – Password Cracking Tool
p0f – Fingerprinting tool
p0f is considered a very versatile passive operating system tool. It can identify OS on the following:
– Machines that can be connected to your box (SYN mode),
– Machines that you can connect to (SYN+ACK mode),
– A machine that you cannot connect to (RST+ mode),
– Machines whose communications you can observe.
To put it in short, pof tool can fingerprint almost anything just by listening and does not require any active connections towards the target machine.
Download p0f Fingerprinting Tool
SuperScan – TCP Port Scanner
SuperScan is a powerful TCP port scanner, singer, and resolver. The super scan version 4 is an update of the popular Windows port scanning tool that is super scan. You can use the super scan as an alternative for Nmap on windows with a decent interface, and it will work out fine.
Download SuperScan Port Scanner
Yersinia – Penetration Testing Tool
Yersinia is yet another tool that is designed specially to take advantage of specific weaknesses in different layer 2 protocols. It pretends to be the sole framework used for testing and analyzing networks and systems that are deployed.
The following protocols are implemented currently; Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), IEEE 802.1q, Inter-Switch Link Protocol (ISL), VLAN Trunking Protocol (VTP), Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP), Dynamic Trunking Protocol (DTP), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).
Download Yersinia Pentesting Tool
SEE ALSO: Top 10 Best Password Cracking Tools (Download).
Wireshark (formerly ethereal)
Wireshark is considered as a GTK+ based analyzer or sniffer of network protocol. This lets you interactively browse and capture the various contents of the network frames. The primary purpose of the project is to create an analyzer of commercial quality for UNIX and to provide wire shark features that are missing from the closed source sniffers. Wire shark can work both on windows (with a Graphic User Interface) and Linux. It is easy to use and reconstruct the IP or TCP streams.
PuTTy – Used by black hat hackers
PuTTy comes in as a free implementation of telnet and SSH UNIX platforms and Windows 32. It also comes along with an xtern terminal emulator. It is a must-have for or any h4z0r to SSH or telnet from windows without using the default MS command-line clients.
Eraser – Data Removal
Another security tool for windows is an eraser. It lets you remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it many times with carefully selected patterns. Such a tool can work with Windows 95, 9 ME, 2000, NT, XP, and DOS. The tool comes in free, and its source code is released under the general public license (GNU).
Eraser is considered an excellent tool for keeping your data all safe and secured. Once you have deleted the device make sure that it is gone for sure as no one likes it be hanging somewhere and drive one crazy.
Cain and Abel – Password Cracker Tool
Cain and Abel is yet another password cracking and recovery tool from the Microsoft OS. You can quickly recover different kinds of passwords by adopting the following ways:
- Sniffing the network
- Cracking encrypted passwords by using a dictionary
- Recording VoIP conversations
- Brute force attacks
- Cryptanalysis attacks
- Revealing password boxes
- Decoding the scrambled passwords
- Uncovering the cached passwords
- Analyzing routing protocols
The Cain and Abel password cracking and recovery tool does not exploit software vulnerabilities nor has any bugs that cannot be fixed with a little effort.
Download Cain and Abel for Free
Hping
Hping is considered as a command-line oriented IP or TCP packet analyzer. Its interface is inspired by the ping UNIX command. Hping is not able to send it to ICMP echo requests. Hping comes with a traceroute, thus can send files between a covered channel. It comes with other features as well. Hping supports protocols like; TCP, ICMP, UDP and RAW-IP.
SEE ALSO: 6 Best Free SQL Injection Tools for Hacking Databases (Download).
Kismet
Last but not least kismet is an 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector and sniffer. It is also an intrusion detection system. It can work out with any wireless card which can support raw monitoring (rfom) mode. It is also able to sniff 802.11b, 802.11g and 802.11a traffic.
Update: As previously stated Kismet can now be downloaded from our website.
AndroRAT – Powerful Android RAT
AndroRAT is one of the most sophisticated Remote Administration Tools available for Android devices to date. The biggest benefit it has is that it is open-source. It is a complete spying tool! It allows you to spy on victims’ call logs, text messages and basically everything they are doing on their phone. The latest version is currently released at v1.3, however, it is no longer in support of its original author.
It comes with a ‘Server’ tool that allows you to create an APK file that needs to be installed on the target phone.
Is your favorite hacking tool listed here?
These top 15 security utilities for ethical hacking are tools that are free to download and work on Windows and Linux too! I will highly recommend learning some Linux skills and have Kali Linux installed before downloading any of the tools above. Please do let us know any other hacking utilities that you would like in our list above.