The 10 most popular free/commercial security tools!

ujjwal.khare Thu May 08, 2008 10:25 pm

*The list doesn’t include NMap (my favorite port scanner J) since it was generated as the result of a poll conducted on the NMap website.

1. Nessus

http://www.nessus.org

Description: Remote network security auditor, the client The Nessus Security Scanner is a security auditing tool. It makes possible to test security modules in an attempt to find vulnerable spots that should be fixed. . It is made up of two parts: a server, and a client. The server/daemon, nessusd, is in charge of the attacks, whereas the client, nessus, interferes with the user through nice X11/GTK+ interface. . This package contains the GTK+ 1.2 client, which exists in other forms and on other platforms, too.

2. Netcat

http://www.atstake.com/research/tools/index.html

Note: This is an unofficial site
Description: TCP/IP swiss army knife A simple Unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections using TCP or UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.

3. Tcpdump	http://www.tcpdump.org
Description: A powerful tool for network monitoring and data acquisition This program allows you to dump the traffic on a network. It can be used to print out the headers of packets on a network interface that matches a given expression. You can use this tool to track down network problems, to detect "ping attacks" or to monitor the network activities.

4. Snort

http://www.snort.org

Description: flexible packet sniffer/logger that detects attacks Snort is a libpcap-based packet sniffer/logger which can be used as a lightweight network intrusion detection system. It features rules based logging and can perform content searching/matching in addition to being used to detect a variety of other attacks and probes, such as buffer overflows, stealth port scans, CGI attacks, SMB probes, and much more. Snort has a real-time alerting capability, with alerts being sent to syslog, a separate "alert" file, or even to a Windows computer via Samba.

5. Saint	http://www.saintcorporation.com/saint
Description: SAINT (Security Administrator's Integrated Network Tool) is a security assesment tool based on SATAN. Features include scanning through a firewall, updated security checks from CERT & CIAC bulletins, 4 levels of severity (red, yellow, brown, & green) and a feature rich HTML interface.

6. Ethereal	http://www.ethereal.com/
Description: Network traffic analyzer Ethereal is a network traffic analyzer, or "sniffer", for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It uses GTK+, a graphical user interface library, and libpcap, a packet capture and filtering library.

7. Whisker	http://www.wiretrip.net/rfp/p/doc.asp?id=21&iface=2
Description: Rain.Forest.Puppy's excellent CGI vulnerability scanner

8. Internet Security Scanner	www.iss.net
Note: This tool costs significant $$$ to use, and does not come with source code. Description: A popular commercial network security scanner.

9. Abacus Portsentry

http://www.psionic.com/products/portsentry.html

Description: Portscan detection daemon PortSentry has the ability to detect portscans(including stealth scans) on the network interfaces of your machine. Upon alarm it can block the attacker via hosts.deny, dropped route or firewall rule. It is part of the Abacus program suite. . Note: If you have no idea what a port/stealth scan is, I'd recommend to have a look at

http://www.psionic.com/products/portsentry.html before installing this package. Otherwise you might easily block hosts you'd better not(e.g. your NFS-server, name-server, ...).

10. DSniff	http://naughty.monkey.org/~dugsong/dsniff/
Description: A suite of powerful for sniffing networks for passwords and other information. Includes sophisticated techniques for defeating the "protection" of network switchers.

**Admin** Fri May 09, 2008 10:19 am

Thanks for sharing

The 10 most popular free/commercial security tools!

The 10 most popular free/commercial security tools!

Re: The 10 most popular free/commercial security tools!