In general, hacking means accessing someone’s data without their permission. Hacking is a technical effort to manipulate the normal behavior of network connections and connected systems and hacker is the person who is engaged in hacking. A hacking tool is usually a piece of software which is designed to assist the hacker in the process of hacking. But nowadays, penetration testing & hacking tools are more often used by security industries to test the vulnerabilities in network and applications, however, they can be used by black hat hackers to manipulate networks and steal data. Here in this article, I will provide you with a list of top hacking tools of 2018 which can be used for penetration testing and hacking purposes.
Best hacking tools – Nmap (Network Maper)
Nmap (Network Mapper) is an open source and free tool for network security auditing and is used to scan ports and map networks and is the most popular port scanning tool around. It can also be used by network administrators for network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Here are some of the features that Nmap offers:
- Host discovery
- Port scanning
- Version detection
- OS detection
- Scriptable interaction with the target
All these features make Nmap one of the best known and most useful hack tools available.
Best hacking tools – Metasploit Penetration Testing Software
Metasploit project is a vulnerability explitation tool and is a hugely popular hacking framework. Nmap, Metasploit and Wireshark are definitely the three most popular and best known hacker tools available. You can think of Metasploit as a ‘collection of hacking tools and frameworks’ that can be used to execute various tasks. This tool is an awesome piece of software that is used by security experts for penetration testing. Metasploit project offers several interfaces:
- Metasploit Framework Edition
- Metasploit Community Edition
- Metasploit Express
- Metasploit Pro
- Armitage
- Cobalt Strike
Metasploit is essentially a computer security project that provides the user with vital information regarding known security vulnerabilities and also can be used for hacking purposes.
Best hacking tools – John The Ripper
John The Ripper is a password cracking tool and can be used to hack password easily. JTR is an awesome piece of software that can be used to crack passwords even the most complicated ones. This tool is a popular password cracking pentesting tool that is most commonly used to perform dictionary attacks. Password cracking is the process of hacking passwords from data that have been stored in or has been transmitted by a computer system or within a network. JTR combines a number of password crackers into one package, autodetects password hash types, and includes a customizable cracker.
Is John The Ripper Free? Both. There is a very popular free version of John The Ripper, and also a ‘pro’ version. For average users, the open-source version of JTR will work well. For hard-core users, I recommend the pro version.
Best hacking tools – THC Hydra
I have listed the Hydra under John The Ripper because these too hack tools come hand in hand. THC Hydra is a password cracking tool and is a hugely popular password cracker and has a very active and experienced development team. This tool is a fast and reliable network login hacking tool that uses Bruteforce or dictionary attacks to try various passwords.
THC Hydra is a free tools and it gives the Security experts the possibility to know how easy it would be to gain unauthorized access from remote to a system.
There are already several login hacker tools available, however, none does either support more than one protocol to attack or support parallelized connects. THC Hydra can perform very fast dictionary attacks against more than fifty protocols.
So what is the difference between John The Ripper and THC Hydra? To put it simple, John The Ripper is an offline password cracker while THC Hydra is an online password cracker.
Best hacking tools – Wireshark
Wireshark is a web vulnerability scanner which is very popular and captures data packets in a network in real time and then displays the data in human-readable format. This hacker tool is a free and open source packet analyzer. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development.
Wireshark is a data capturing program that “understands” the structure of different networking protocols and can parse and display the fields, along with their meanings as specified by different networking protocols. This hacker tool is free for download on its official website.
Best hacking tools – Aircrack-ng
Aircrack-ng is another password cracking tool which is very effective for WiFi hacking when use properly. Aircrack-ng is an WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking hacking tool that can recover keys when sufficient data packets have been captured. If you are a mediocre hacker then you can use Aircrack-ng to crack WEP passwords in a few minutes but you need to be pretty professional to be able to use this tool to crack WPA/ WPA2.
Aircrack-ng is a network hacking tool that consists of a packet sniffer, detector, WPA/WPA2-PSK cracker, WEP and an analysis tool for for 802.11 wireless LANs.
Best hacking tools – Cain and Abel
Cain and Abel is a hugely popular hacking tool which is used as a password cracker/ password hacking tool. White and black hat hackers use Cain and Abel to recover or crack many types of passwords using methods such as network packet sniffing and by using the tool to crack password hashes.
Cain and Abel can recover various kinds of passwords by using methods such brute force attacks, cryptanalysis attacks and one of the most used which is the dictionary attack. Here are some of the features of this tool:
- WEP cracking
- Record VoIP conversations
- Decoding scrambled passwords
- Calculating hashes
- ARP spoofing
- Network password sniffer
- Speeding up packet capture speed by wireless packet injection
