With the advent of industrial tools for penetration testing and bug bounty search, the field of ethical hacking is facing tremendous growth. When learning about ethical hacking in technology, in addition to mastering outdated vulnerabilities and lab attacks, you should also understand their basic tools. If you’re not already familiar with ethical hacking, let’s define the technology before understanding the set of tools used.
If cybersecurity refers to the protection of individual components from cyberattacks, a hacker is the one who hacks into the secrecy of a system. But make no mistake. Hacking isn’t always a bad thing. This is why the adjective “ethical” coexists with the word “hacker,” giving it a meaningful and positive connotation, in which ethical hackers protect organizations from cyberattacks by discovering vulnerabilities in computer networks. To put it simply, there is no need to join the army to protect the country. You can also be an ethical hacker. Now, let’s get to know the tools that are widely used by industry professionals.
Nmap
Nmap stands for Network Mapping. This fast and reliable network and port scanner was first released by Gordon Lyons in 1997. Nmap is a powerful utility that can be used as a security scanner as well as an ASA vulnerability detector. This is one of the best scanning tools for “ethical hacking”, which scans the top 1000 most likely ports with NMap by default. The host detection tool is also used for information gathering, analysis, utilization, and enumeration purposes. This tool was originally built for the Linux operating system. But in later years, the development of cybersecurity prompted the tool to be shipped to other major distributions such as Windows, OS X, BSD, etc. NMap is a free and open-source tool for banner scraping and version detection of various software, even leveraging them in the case of using outdated versions.
Burp Suite
This is used to securely test web applications. The Burp kit involves a tool bundle developed by the company Bozweig. When it comes to industry professionals, Burp Suite is one of the most popular tools in web security, a versatile security utility for bounty hunting. In addition, the Hit Suite community also includes a number of hand tools that help us experience web security at its best. Playing agents are oxygen cylinders in a user-driven workflow. It operates as a web proxy server between the browser and the target application, allowing us to intercept, inspect and modify the raw traffic that is passed in both directions. In short, it’s useful to block the accumulation of project data for out-of-scope projects.
Google Dorks
Hackers widely use this tool to find security vulnerabilities in websites as it helps locate hidden data on the web platform. It can even fetch information that would be difficult to search queries using regular databases. Even though this is an ethical activity, data from certain people is still reused by certain people for some illegal and undesirable activities, such as theft and cyber terrorism at its end. The concept of Google hacking or Dorking was born around 2002 and has since been adopted by other search engines to discover vulnerable systems and sensitive information breaches.
Dirsearch
Dirsearch is a Python-based command-line tool used in Ethical Hacking. How can’t we use search to identify websites that are made up of sensitive information or data? Yes the dirsearch tool is used to analyze all the directories in depth and scramble the directories with witty information in order to retrieve such details from the directories. The use of the Python environment makes this web path scanner easy to integrate into scripts and other projects. This tool is essential for discovering potential attack vectors and attack processes, and fast recursive scanning embeds a command-line usage, making dirsearch a powerful tool that every pen tester should know to use.
Sublist3r
In the context of highlighting the best tools for ethical hacking in 2020, this is the last tool I want to mention. This is also based on the Python language and can be called a subdomain discovery tool designed to enumerate the subdomains of various websites. This well-known tool is often used by bounty hunters and penetration testers. While there are many other novice tools in ethical hacking that can replace Sublist3R, this powerful tool is still loved by industry experts for frictionless penetration testing workflows.
There are many other tools available for ethical hacking, bug bounty testing, and penetration testing. These are the top 5 tools to choose from based on the popularity of the use case and industry experts. So, if you’re looking to build an ethical hacking career in 2020, start by familiarizing yourself with the tools and then learn to perform banner scraping features. In short, as an ethical hacker, to find vulnerabilities, don’t forget to use these weapons to win the battle for security.
