SecTools.Org: Top 125 Network Security Tools

For more than a decade, the Nmap Project has been cataloguing the network security community's favorite tools. In 2011 this site became much more dynamic, offering ratings, reviews, searching, sorting, and a new tool suggestion form. This site allows open source and commercial tools on any platform, except those tools that we maintain (such as the Nmap Security Scanner, Ncat network connector, and Nping packet manipulator).

We're very impressed by the collective smarts of the security community and we highly recommend reading the whole list and investigating any tools you are unfamiliar with. Click any tool name for more details on that particular application, including the chance to read (and write) reviews. Many site elements are explained by tool tips if you hover your mouse over them. Enjoy!

Sort by: popularity rating release date

← previous page Tools 51–60 of 125 next page →

(8) ★★★★½ THC Hydra (#22, 7)

When you need to brute force crack a remote authentication service, Hydra is often the tool of choice. It can perform rapid dictionary attacks against more than 50 protocols, including telnet, ftp, http, https, smb, several databases, and much more. Like THC Amap this release is from the fine folks at THC. Other online crackers are Medusa and Ncrack. The Nmap Security Scanner also contains many online brute force password cracking modules. Read 25 reviews.

Latest release: version 8.2 on June 16, 2016 (7 years, 10 months ago).

(6) ★★★★½ Secunia PSI (#68, new!)

Secunia PSI (Personal Software Inspector) is a free security tool designed to detect vulnerable and out-dated programs and plug-ins that expose your PC to attacks. Attacks exploiting vulnerable programs and plug-ins are rarely blocked by traditional anti-virus programs. Secunia PSI checks only the machine it is running on, while its commercial sibling Secunia CSI (Corporate Software Inspector) scans multiple machines on a network. Read 6 reviews.

Latest release: version 2.0 on Jan. 10, 2011 (13 years, 3 months ago).

(6) ★★★★½ inSSIDer (#90, new!)

inSSIDer is a wireless network scanner for Windows, OS X, and Android. It was designed to overcome limitations of NetStumbler, namely not working well on 64-bit Windows and Windows Vista. inSSIDer can find open wireless access points, track signal strength over time, and save logs with GPS records. Read 11 reviews.

Latest release: version 4.1.0 on Jan. 22, 2015 (9 years, 3 months ago).

(10) ★★★★½ Aircrack (#4, 17)

Aircrack is a suite of tools for 802.11a/b/g WEP and WPA cracking. It implements the best known cracking algorithms to recover wireless keys once enough encrypted packets have been gathered. . The suite comprises over a dozen discrete tools, including airodump (an 802.11 packet capture program), aireplay (an 802.11 packet injection program), aircrack (static WEP and WPA-PSK cracking), and airdecap (decrypts WEP/WPA capture files). Read 15 reviews.

Latest release: version 1.1 on April 24, 2010 (14 years ago).

(10) ★★★★½ Nikto (#14, 2)

Nikto is an Open Source (GPL) web server scanner which performs comprehensive tests against web servers for multiple items, including over 6400 potentially dangerous files/CGIs, checks for outdated versions of over 1200 servers, and version specific problems on over 270 servers. It also checks for server configuration items such as the presence of multiple index files, HTTP server options, and will attempt to identify installed web servers and software. Scan items and plugins are frequently updated and can be automatically updated. Read 15 reviews.

Latest release: version 2.1.4 on Feb. 20, 2011 (13 years, 2 months ago).

(4) ★★★★½ Firefox (#55, new!)

Firefox is a web browser, a descendant of Mozilla. It emerged as a serious competitor to Internet Explorer, with improved security as one of its features. While Firefox no longer has a stellar security record, security professionals still appreciate it for its wide selection of security-related add-ons, including Tamper Data, Firebug, and NoScript. Read 4 reviews.

Latest release: version 40.0.3 on Aug. 27, 2015 (8 years, 8 months ago).

(17) ★★★★ BackTrack (#7, 25)

This excellent bootable live CD Linux distribution comes from the merger of Whax and Auditor. It boasts a huge variety of Security and Forensics tools and provides a rich development environment. User modularity is emphasized so the distribution can be easily customized by the user to include personal scripts, additional tools, customized kernels, etc. BackTrack is succeeded by Kali Linux. Read 22 reviews.

Latest release: version 5 R3 on Aug. 13, 2012 (11 years, 8 months ago).

(1) ★★★★ Maltego (#34, new!)

Maltego is a forensics and data mining application. It is capable of querying various public data sources and graphically depicting the relationships between entities such as people, companies, web sites, and documents. Maltego is an open source intelligence too, but isn't open source software. Read 1 review.

Latest release: version 3.0.3 on Jan. 17, 2011 (13 years, 3 months ago).

(4) ★★★★ QualysGuard (#42, 31)

QualysGuard is a popular SaaS (software as a service) vulnerability management offering. It's web-based UI offers network discovery and mapping, asset prioritization, vulnerability assessment reporting and remediation tracking according to business risk. Internal scans are handled by Qualys appliances which communicate back to the cloud-based system. Read 5 reviews.

Latest release: version 6.18 on Feb. 25, 2011 (13 years, 2 months ago).

(2) ★★★★ AppScan (#47, 51)

AppScan provides security testing throughout the application development lifecycle, easing unit testing and security assurance early in the development phase. Appscan scans for many common vulnerabilities, such as cross site scripting, HTTP response splitting, parameter tampering, hidden field manipulation, backdoors/debug options, buffer overflows and more. AppScan was merged into IBM's Rational division after IBM purchased its original developer (Watchfire) in 2007. Read 2 reviews.

Latest release: version 8.5 on Nov. 15, 2011 (12 years, 5 months ago).

← previous page Tools 51–60 of 125 next page →

Categories