Top 5 Penetration Testing Tools

Penetration Testing is a method of testing in which the areas of weakness in the software systems in terms of security are put to test to determine, if ‘weak-point’ is indeed one, that can be broken into or not.

#1 Acunetix Vulnerability Scanner

Acunetix is a fully automated web vulnerability scanner that detects and reports on over 4500 web application vulnerabilities including all variants of SQL Injection and XSS.

It complements the role of a penetration tester by automating tasks that can take hours to test for manually, delivering accurate results with no false positives at top speed.

#2 Core Impact

Core impact is over 20 years in the market and claim the largest range of exploits available in the market, they also let you run the free Metasploit exploits within their framework if they are missing one. They automate a lot of processes with wizards, have a complete audit trail including PowerShell commands, and can re-test a client simply by re-playing the audit trail.

Core write their own ‘Commercial Grade’ exploits to guarantee quality and offer technical support around both those exploits and their platform.

They claim to be the market leader and used to have a price tag to match.  More recently the price has come down and they have models appropriate for both corporates and security consultancies.

#3 Metasploit

Metasploit is the most advanced and popular Framework that can be used to for pen-testing. It is based on the concept of ‘exploit’ which is a code that can surpass the security measures and enter a certain system. If entered, it runs a ‘payload’, a code that performs operations on a target machine, thus creating a perfect framework for penetration testing.

It can be used on web applications, networks, servers etc. It has a command-line and the GUI clickable interface works on Linux, Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Although there might be few free limited trials available, this is a commercial product.

#4 Nessus

Nessus is also a scanner and it needs to be watched out for. It is one of the most robust vulnerability identifier tools available. It specializes in compliance checks, Sensitive data searches, IPs scan, website scanning etc. and aids in finding the ‘weak-spots’.

It works best on most of the environments. For more information and in order to download, visit the below page.

#5 Burp Suite

Burp Suite is also essentially a scanner (with a limited “intruder” tool for attacks), although many security testing specialists swear that pen-testing without this tool is unimaginable. The tool is not free, but very cost effective.

Take a look at it on the below download page. It mainly works wonders with intercepting proxy, crawling content and functionality, web application scanning etc.  You can use this on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux environments.

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