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John the Ripper : A powerful, flexible, and fast multi-platform password hash cracker John the Ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix (11 are officially supported, not counting different architectures), DOS, Win32, BeOS, and…
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Cain and Abel
Cain and Abel : The top password recovery tool for Windows UNIX users often smugly assert that the best free security tools support their platform first, and Windows ports are often an afterthought. They are usually right, but Cain &…
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Tcpdump
Tcpdump : The classic sniffer for network monitoring and data acquisition Tcpdump is the IP sniffer we all used before Ethereal (Wireshark) came on the scene, and many of us continue to use it frequently. It may not have the…
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Kismet
Kismet : A powerful wireless sniffer Kismet is an console (ncurses) based 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. It identifies networks by passively sniffing (as opposed to more active tools such as NetStumbler), and can even…
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Hping2
Hping2 : A network probing utility like ping on steroids This handy little utility assembles and sends custom ICMP, UDP, or TCP packets and then displays any replies. It was inspired by the ping command, but offers far more control…
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Metasploit Framework
Metasploit Framework : Hack the Planet Metasploit took the security world by storm when it was released in 2004. No other new tool even broke into the top 15 of this list, yet Metasploit comes in at #5, ahead of…
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Netcat
Netcat : The network Swiss army knife This simple utility reads and writes data across TCP or UDP network connections. It is designed to be a reliable back-end tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs…