Question
Could you recommend a comprehensive open-source software for testing vulnerabilities in web applications, networks, and more?
Answer
Check the following list:
Nmap: A versatile tool used for network discovery and security auditing. Nmap can identify devices running on your network and the services they are exposing to the network.
Wireshark: Useful for packet analysis, Wireshark can help you understand the traffic on your network, which is critical for identifying suspicious activities.
Metasploit: This is a powerful tool for developing and executing exploit code against a remote target machine. It’s widely used for penetration testing.
SQLMap: Specifically designed for SQL injection testing, SQLMap can detect and exploit SQL injection flaws and take over database servers.
Burp Suite: Primarily used for testing web application security, Burp Suite can identify vulnerabilities and security holes in your web applications.
OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy): This is one of the world’s most popular free security tools and is actively maintained by hundreds of international volunteers. It can help you automatically find security vulnerabilities in your web applications while developing and testing them.
W3AF (Web Application Attack and Audit Framework): This web application security scanner helps developers and penetration testers identify and exploit vulnerabilities in their web applications.
Nessus: While not completely open-source, Nessus has a free version and is a very popular vulnerability scanner that is used to scan for network vulnerabilities, policy violations, and other security issues.
OpenVAS (Open Vulnerability Assessment System): It is a full-featured vulnerability scanner. Its capabilities include unauthenticated testing, authenticated testing, various high and low-level Internet and industrial protocols, performance tuning for large-scale scans, and a powerful internal programming language.
Parrotsec: Parrot Security provides a huge arsenal of tools, utilities, and libraries that IT and security professionals can use to test and assess the security of their assets in a reliable, compliant, and reproducible way. From information gathering to the final report. The Parrot system gets you covered with the most flexible environment.
Kali Linux: Kali is a free suite of open-source tools built into a custom Linux distribution maintained by Offensive Security. It comes prepackaged with over 300 security tools, almost all of which are open-source, and many of them are industry-recognized.
- Maintained by Offensive Security.
- Defacto platform for many security professionals.
- Comes prepackaged with over 300 security tools.
- Fully customizable.
- Has multiple architecture versions.
In addition to what has been listed above, you can identify technical vulnerabilities using free or low-cost vulnerability scanning tools like Kali Linux, Nessus Essentials, or OpenVAS.
To begin, start small by identifying your most important assets. Then, run the scanner, fix any high or critical vulnerabilities that are found, and document your progress and any exceptions. Repeat this process until all vulnerabilities have been identified and addressed.
Once you have decided to go for a penetration test, should Kali be performed in a production environment? What are the risks for your business? And can you accept these risks? Depending on the risks, If the risks seem too high, the alternative is to perform a pentest on Test/UAT. Typically, a staging, dev, or test environment is identical to the production environment.
I prefer to use Threat Modeling (TM) before doing any pen testing. TM considers the appropriate types of insider or outsider threats to systems and applications, whether in a malicious capacity or form of a mistake. Then proceed to map how these probable attacks can be realized using the software’s existing or new vulnerabilities. TM is a type of due diligence because of the amount of research put in beforehand and is most effective during the design phase of systems and applications.