I won’t speak for every hacker, but this hacker loves tools. Especially tools that tell me interesting things, even small, incremental things that lead me to larger discoveries. So I’m quick to leap on articles like this one:
http://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/the-hacking-toolkit-13-essential-network-security-utilities/
Here’s the list:
- The Social-Engineer Toolkit: Hacking Layer 8 (http://www.social-engineer.org)
- Metasploit: Packaging up all those handy exploits (https://www.metasploit.com/)
- Nmap: For network mapping, of course (http://Nmap.org)
- Cain and Abel: These brothers are password capture and cracking experts (http://www.oxid.it/)
- John the Ripper: A password cracker also useful as a password-complexity-enforcer on Linux/Unix systems (http://www.openwall.com/)
- Hash Suite: Free and Premium versions of this famous password cracker can break more kinds of hashes than you ever imagined exist (http://openwall.net)
- Wireshark: De facto and de jure standard for packet capture (https://www.wireshark.org/)
- Ettercap: Session hijacking and Man in the Middle attacks made to order (https://ettercap.github.io)
- Burp Suite: Oh so much fun with web hacking (https://portswigger.net)
- GnuPG: PGP/GPG email encryption for when you absolutely, positively better have it (https://www.gnupg.org/)
- PuTTY: The Windows terminal emulator that makes Linux command-line access simple (http://www.putty.org/)
- Maltego: Network miner, link visualizer, and forensics all in one (https://www.paterva.com)
- Kali Linux: Hmm, not so much a tool as an OS that includes most of the tools above (https://www.kali.org/)
I like the list, but of course it’s not comprehensive. (Where is hping3 or Scapy?) What tools would you add to the list?