Top 50 Hacking Tools That You Must Have

Whether you are a Penetration tester, a hacker or an aspiring newbie trying to learn Cyber Security, you must have a nice catalogue of tools to make your life easier. While these tools do make working simpler but cannot compensate for the vast amount of knowledge required in this field. Ethical hacking and online security involves a lot efforts. Many tools are used to test and keep software secure. The same tools can also be used by hackers for exploitation.

A hacking tool is a computer program or software which helps a hacker to hack a computer system or a computer program.

In this post I am going to mention 50 different tools under 9 categories that your ‘Hack Lab’ must have. Most of the tools mentioned in this post are pre-included in Kali Linux which you can install to have them at once.

Intrusion Detection Systems :-

These are the tools you must have if you’re building a hack lab for penetration testing or for any security arrangement. They help you detect of any threats that might harm the system.

Snort

NetCop

Encryption Tools :-

While the above tools do identify any suspicious activity but they can’t protect your data, you need encryption tools for that.

TrueCrypt (The project has been shut down and no longer supported)

OpenSSH

Putty

OpenSSL

Tor

OpenVPN

Stunnel

KeePass

Port Scanners :-

The next big thing is Port Scanners, you can’t penetrate a network without knowing what services are running on what ports.

Nmap

Superscan

Angry IP Scanner

Packet Sniffers :-

These tools let you intercept traffic incoming/outgoing from the network.

Wireshark

Tcpdump

Ettercap

Dsniff

EtherApe

Traffic Monitoring :-

These tools let’s you monitor and analyze what is currently going on in a network.

Splunk

Nagios

P0f

Ngrep  

Vulnerability Exploitation :-

These are the hardcore tools that you will use after identifying the flaw or loop hole in the security of a network.

Metasploit (The Best)

Sqlmap

Sqlninja

Social Engineer Toolkit

NetSparker

BeEF

Dradis

Packet Crafting :-

Packet Crafting tools facilitate finding vulnerabilities within the firewall.

Hping

Scapy

Netcat

Yersinia

Nemesis

Socat

Password Crackers :-

These tools let you crack passwords a computer has stored in it or is transmitting over the network.

Ophcrack

Medusa

RainbowCrack

Wfuzz

Brutus

L0phtCrack

Fgdump

THC Hydra

John The Ripper

Aircrack

oclHashcat

Cain and Abel

Wireless Hacking :-

If a network have a Wi-fi access point then it can easily be broken into. Various encryption methods like WEP, WPA/WPA2  or even the latest WPS have some serious security flaws. These tools help you intrude much easily.

Aircrack-ng

Kismet

InSSIDer

KisMAC

These were some of the tools which must be in any Cyber Security Researcher’s arsenal. So, What are you waiting for – Let the hacking begin..!!Did I miss some other cool tools which must be in this list, do let me know in the comments.Enjoy..!!