Popular Information security tools

Can you imagine peeping into your network and

• seeing the traffic come in and go
• see the applications on the net that are trying to access various software on your system,
• and understand the weaknesses in your system and more?

All this and more can be done by various tools that are available to study the systems. Tools in the Information security domain help us to analyze and understand the network traffic in a deeper way. There are many tools constantly appearing and it is good to keep with the new technologies and changes. 
Here is a brief list of some of the popular Information security tools:

• Metasploit

        ‘Metasploit’ is a popular pen testing framework primarily designed to hack into systems and test them before the hackers can penetrate them and cause damages. It is available for the Windows, Linux and macOS operating system. It was originally written in Perl and then it was rewritten in Ruby. It is currently owned by Boston based company Rapid7. It has an open source version as well as commercial version.

• Wireshark

        ‘Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer and packet sniffer and was formerly known as ‘‘Ethereal’. It is freely available for the Windows, Linux,macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD operating systems. Wireshark enables you to read and analyze the traffic packets and not alter it in any way.
Here are a few features of Wireshark:

• “Deep inspection of hundreds of protocols
• Live capture and offline analysis
• Standard three-pane packet browser
• Captured network data can be browsed via a GUI, or via the TTY-mode TShark utility
• The most powerful display filters in the industry
• Rich VoIP analysis”(Source: https://www.wireshark.org)

For more on Wireshark, read more here.

• Nessus

       ‘Nessus’ is a vulnerability scanner available from Tenable, Inc. It is available for the Windows, Linux and macOS platforms. It is primarily used to detect and identify vulnerabilities and stay ahead of the hackers. It has been trusted by more than 27,000 organizations and is one of the most widely used vulnerability scanners.
On an average, when a new vulnerability is disclosed, a new plugin is released within 24 hours of its disclosure. There have been more than 100 zero day vulnerabilities discovered in the past 3 years by means of the Nessus scanner.

• AirCrack

         Aircrack is a tool that is used to assess Wi-Fi security. It consists of a tool for detector, packet sniffer, cracker and analysis tools.

• John The Ripper

        Since weak passwords are still the easiest way to hack into a system, ‘John the Ripper’ is a tool to detect just that. This tool detects weak passwords and is available as a free and Open source version as well as a commercial version. It is available for Windows, macOS, DOS, Unix, BeOS and OpenVMS.  For more information on John the Ripper, visit this link.

We have seen a just a brief list of the different tools in the Information security domain. Stay tuned for more technical posts!