BASIC Tools

Fping : A parallel ping scanning program fping is a ping(1) like program which uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request to determine if a host is up. fping is different from ping in that you can specify any number of hosts on the command line, or specify a file containing the lists […]

VMware : Multi-platform Virtualization Software VMware virtualization software lets you run one operating system within another. This is quite useful for security researchers who commonly need to test code, exploits, etc on multiple platforms. It only runs on Windows and Linux as the host OS, but pretty much any x86 OS will run inside the

Honeyd : Your own personal honeynet Honeyd is a small daemon that creates virtual hosts on a network. The hosts can be configured to run arbitrary services, and their TCP personality can be adapted so that they appear to be running certain versions of operating systems. Honeyd enables a single host to claim multiple addresses

cheops / cheops-ng : Gives a simple interface to many network utilities, maps local or remote networks and identifies OS of machines Cheops provides the functionality of many network utilities through a comfortable, powerful GUI. It has host/network discovery functionality as well as OS detection of hosts. Cheops-ng has the ability to probe hosts to

ClamAV : A GPL anti-virus toolkit for UNIX ClamAV is a powerful AntiVirus scanner focused towards integration with mail servers for attachment scanning. It provides a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner, and a tool for automatic updating via the Internet. Clam AntiVirus is based on a shared library distributed with the

Fport : Foundstone’s enhanced netstat Fport reports all open TCP/IP and UDP ports on the machine you run it on and shows what application opened each port. So it can be used to quickly identify unknown open ports and their associated applications. It only runs on Windows, but many UNIX systems now provided this information

Arpwatch : Keeps track of ethernet/IP address pairings and can detect certain monkey business Arpwatch is the classic ARP man-in-the-middle attack detector from LBNL’s Network Research Group. It syslogs activity and reports certain changes via email. Arpwatch uses LibPcap to listen for ARP packets on a local ethernet interface.

LSoF : LiSt Open Files This Unix-specific diagnostic and forensics tool lists information about any files that are open by processes currently running on the system. It can also list communications sockets open by each process. For a Windows equivalent, check out Process Explorer from Sysinternals.

Google : Everyone’s Favorite Search Engine While it is far more than a security tool, Google’s massive database is a good mind for security researchers and penetration testers. You can use it to dig up information about a target company by using directives such as “site:target-domain.com” and find employee names, sensitive information that they wrongly

Sam Spade : Freeware Windows network query tool Sam Spade provides a consistent GUI and implementation for many handy network query tasks. It was designed with tracking down spammers in mind, but can be useful for many other network exploration, administration, and security tasks. It includes tools such as ping, nslookup, whois, dig, traceroute, finger,

Perl / Python / Ruby : Portable, general-purpose scripting languages While many canned security tools are available on this site for handling common tasks, scripting languages allow you to write your own (or modify existing ones) when you need something more custom. Quick, portable scripts can test, exploit, or even fix systems. Archives like CPAN

OpenSSH / PuTTY / SSH : A secure way to access remote computers SSH (Secure Shell) is the now ubiquitous program for logging into or executing commands on a remote machine. It provides secure encrypted communications between two untrusted hosts over an insecure network, replacing the hideously insecure telnet/rlogin/rsh alternatives. Most UNIX users run the

Ping/telnet/dig/traceroute/whois/netstat : The basics While there are many whiz-bang high-tech tools out there to assist in security auditing, don’t forget about the basics! Everyone should be very familiar with these tools as they come with most operating systems (except that Windows omits whois and uses the name tracert). They can be very handy in a