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!

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Tools 1–10 of 125 next page →

(6) ★★★★½ SAINT Security Suite (#110, 19)

SAINT is a commercial vulnerability assessment and penetration system. It was originally developed in the late 1990's as free UNIX tool based on the open source SATAN scanner. Later it went commercial and broadened into a whole suite of tools for vulnerability detection, exploitation, and asset management. It is available on multiple platforms, including appliances (SAINTbox) and cloud-hosted (SAINTcloud). Top competitors include Nessus, Nexpose, and QualysGuard. Read 12 reviews.

Latest release: version 9.8 on May 1, 2020 (3 years, 10 months ago).

(5) ★★★½ Acunetix (#41, 55)

Acunetix is a web vulnerability scanner that automatically checks web applications for vulnerabilities such as SQL Injections, cross site scripting, arbitrary file creation/deletion, and weak password strength on authentication pages. It boasts a comfortable GUI, an ability to create professional security audit and compliance reports, and tools for advanced manual webapp testing. Read 8 reviews.

Latest release: version 11 on Nov. 16, 2016 (7 years, 4 months ago).

(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, 9 months ago).

(3) ★★★★★ Samurai Web Testing Framework (#87, new!)

The Samurai Web Testing Framework is a live linux environment that has been pre-configured to function as a web pen-testing environment. The CD contains the best of the open source and free tools that focus on testing and attacking websites. Samurai includes many other tools featured in this list, such as WebScarab, ratproxy, w3af, Burp Suite, and BeEF. Read 5 reviews.

Latest release: version 3.3.2 on Jan. 22, 2016 (8 years, 1 month ago).

(1) ★★★★★ Netfilter (#37, 14)

Netfilter is a powerful packet filter implemented in the standard Linux kernel. The userspace iptables tool is used for configuration. It now supports packet filtering (stateless or stateful), all kinds of network address and port translation (NAT/NAPT), and multiple API layers for 3rd party extensions. It includes many different modules for handling unruly protocols such as FTP. Read 2 reviews.

Latest release: version 4.2 on Aug. 30, 2015 (8 years, 6 months ago).

no rating GDB (#93, new!)

GDB is the GNU Project's debugger. Security folks use it to analyze unknown binaries, by getting disassemblies and stepping through a program instruction by instruction. GDB can debug programs written in Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Pascal, and other languages. Review this tool.

Latest release: version 7.10 on Aug. 28, 2015 (8 years, 6 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, 6 months ago).

(1) ★★★★★ VMware (#43, 46)

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 or x86_64 OS will run inside the virtualized environment. It is also useful for setting up sandboxes. You can browse from within a VMware window so the even if you are infected with malware, it cannot reach your host OS. And recovering the guest OS is as simple as loading a "snapshot" from prior to the infection. VMware player (executes, but can't create OS images) and VMWare Server (partitions a physical server machine into multiple virtual machines) were recently released for free. An open-source alternative is VirtualBox. Xen is a Linux-specific virtualization system. Read 1 review.

Latest release: version 12.0.0 on Aug. 24, 2015 (8 years, 6 months ago).

(2) ★★★★★ NoScript (#85, new!)

NoScript is an add-on for Firefox that blocks JavaScript, Java, Flash, and other plugin content (allowing you to selectively re-enable them for certain sites). It also offers cross-site scripting protection. This is mainly designed to keep web users safe, but security testers can also use the add-on to see what scripts a site is using. One caution is that the NoScript author Giorgio Maone has been caught inserting hidden code into NoScript which disabled users' ad-blocking software so that ads would still show up on the NoScript web site. He did post a lengthy apology. Read 3 reviews.

Latest release: version 2.6.9.36 on Aug. 20, 2015 (8 years, 7 months ago).

(20) ★★★★★ Wireshark (#1, 1)

Wireshark (known as Ethereal until a trademark dispute in Summer 2006) is a fantastic open source multi-platform network protocol analyzer. It allows you to examine data from a live network or from a capture file on disk. You can interactively browse the capture data, delving down into just the level of packet detail you need. Wireshark has several powerful features, including a rich display filter language and the ability to view the reconstructed stream of a TCP session. It also supports hundreds of protocols and media types. A tcpdump-like console version named tshark is included. One word of caution is that Wireshark has suffered from dozens of remotely exploitable security holes, so stay up-to-date and be wary of running it on untrusted or hostile networks (such as security conferences). Read 31 reviews.

Latest release: version 1.12.7 on Aug. 12, 2015 (8 years, 7 months ago).

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