June 2, 2023 IT hygiene is a security best practice that ensures that digital assets in an organization’s environment are secure and running properly. Good IT hygiene includes vulnerability management, security configuration assessments, maintaining asset and system inventories, and comprehensive visibility into the activities occurring in an environment. As technology advances and the tools used by …
January 12, 2023 Are you looking to take your career in the information security industry to the next level? Look no further than the 2023 Certified Technology Professional Bundle! This unparalleled offer grants you lifetime access to nine comprehensive courses in information security, hacking, and cybersecurity at a remarkable price of just $49.99. Yes, you …
December 17, 2022 Reality has a way of asserting itself, irrespective of any personal or commercial choices we make, good or bad. For example, just recently, the city services of Antwerp in Belgium were the victim of a highly disruptive cyberattack. As usual, everyone cried “foul play” and suggested that proper cybersecurity measures should have …
November 30, 2022 When the headlines focus on breaches of large enterprises like the Optus breach, it’s easy for smaller businesses to think they’re not a target for hackers. Surely, they’re not worth the time or effort? Unfortunately, when it comes to cyber security, size doesn’t matter. Assuming you’re not a target leads to lax …
November 29, 2022 It’s not news that phishing attacks are getting more complex and happening more often. This year alone, APWG reported a record-breaking total of 1,097,811 phishing attacks. These attacks continue to target organizations and individuals to gain their sensitive information. The hard news: they’re often successful, have a long-lasting negative impact on your organization and employees, …
October 12, 2022 The White House has recently announced a $1 billion cyber security grant program that is designed to help state and local governments improve their cyber defenses, especially about protecting critical infrastructure. The recent executive order stems from the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that was signed almost a year ago. That bill allocated $1 billion …
August 31, 2022 As threat complexity increases and the boundaries of an organization have all but disappeared, security teams are more challenged than ever to deliver consistent security outcomes. One company aiming to help security teams meet this challenge is Stellar Cyber. Stellar Cyber claims to address the needs of MSSPs by providing capabilities typically found …
August 4, 2022 The only threat more persistent to organizations than cyber criminals? The cyber security skills crisis. Nearly 60% of enterprises can’t find the staff to protect their data (and reputations!) from new and emerging breeds of cyber-attacks, reports the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) in its 5th annual global industry study. The result? Heavier workloads, unfilled …
April 7, 2022 Communication is a vital skill for any leader at an organization, regardless of seniority. For security leaders, this goes double. Communicating clearly works on multiple levels. On the one hand, security leaders and CISOs must be able to communicate strategies clearly – instructions, incident response plans, and security policies. On the other, …
With an immense number of companies and entities climbing onto the digital bandwagon, cybersecurity considerations have come up as limelight. Besides, new technologies such as Big Data, IoT, and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning are gradually more making inroads into our everyday lives, the threats related to cybercrime are mounting as well. Additionally, the usage of mobile and web apps in transacting financial information has put the complete digital stuff exposed to cybersecurity breaches.
The inherent risks and vulnerabilities found in such apps can be exploited by attackers or cybercriminals to draw off crucial information data counting money. Internationally, cyber-security breaches have caused a yearly loss of USD 20.38 million in 2019 (Source: Statista). Plus, cybercrime has led to a 0.80 percent loss of the entire world’s Gross domestic product, which sums up to approx. USD 2.1 trillion in the year 2019 alone (Source: Cybriant.com).
Statista Report 2018 “Security Threats at All-Time High”. The no. of security threats or vulnerabilities in all kinds of Information Technology software is at an all-time high.
Even the spiraling pandemic has introduced a distressing impact on several enterprises and companies worldwide, the majority of companies arbitrarily attempted or moved their business sections to the untouched or unaffected digital space. Most security funds were, yet, also battered as a collateral outcome of the complete economic downturn. The shrinking budgets mainly exacerbated traumatic digital transformation by gross disregard of privacy and cybersecurity components of the subtle process.
To stem the rot and preempt adverse penalties of cyberthreat or crime, like losing client trust and brand repute, cybersecurity testing should be made compulsory. Cybersecurity expense is nonetheless forecasted to rebound and hit again in the year 2021, giving relief for exhausted CISOs, and their shattered IT, cybersecurity teams. Meanwhile, I would like to acquaint you with a series of best cybersecurity tools that can make a palpable divergence for your overall security program and 2021 budget plans.
What Is Penetration Testing?
The penetration test is a kind of Security testing that is carried out to assess the security of the system (software, hardware, information system, or networks environment). The main objective of this type of testing is to scrutinize all the security risks or vulnerabilities that are found in an app by assessing the system’s security with malevolent techniques and to safeguard the data from the hackers and manage the system’s functionality. Penetration testing is a kind of Non-functional test which intends to make official attempts to breach the system’s security. It is also called a Pen Test or Pen Testing and the QA engineer or tester who performs this testing is considered as a pen tester aka ethical hacker.
What Are the Best Cyber Security Tools for 2021?
Any app security testing method shall require the conduct of a functional test. This way, several security issues, and vulnerabilities can be detected, which if not rectified in time can result in hacking. There are a plethora of paid and open source testing tools available in the market. Let’s discuss the top 10 cybersecurity testing tools to look out for in 2021:
1. NMap
NMap is a short form of Network Mapper. NMap is an open-source and free security scanning tool for security auditing and network exploration. It works on Windows, Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, BSD variants (comprising Mac OS), AmigaOS. NMap is used to detect what hosts are accessible on the network, what versions and OSs they are running, what services those hosts are providing, what kind of firewalls/ packet filters are in use etc., Several network and systems administrators find it beneficial for regular jobs like check for open ports, maintaining service upgrade schedules, network inventory, and monitoring service or host uptime. It comes with both GUI interfaces and command line
Core Features:
Determines hosts on a network
It is used to determine network inventory, network mapping, maintenance, and asset management
Produces traffic to hosts on a network, response time measurement, and response analysis
Used to recognizes open ports on target hosts in the arrangement for auditing
To search and exploit risks as well as vulnerabilities in a network
It is one of the best tools and freely accessible open-source pen-testing tools. Generally, it is one of the network protocol analyzers, it allows you to capture and coordinatively browse the traffic running on a system network. It runs on Linux, Windows, Unix, Solaris, Mac OS, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and several others. Wireshark can be extensively used by educators, security experts, network professionals, and developers. The information that is recovered through the Wireshark software testing tool can be viewed through a Graphical User Interface or the TTY-mode TShark utility.
Core Features:
Rich VoIP analysis
Live capture and offline scrutiny
In-depth examination of hundreds of protocols
Runs on UNIX, Linux, Windows, Solaris, macOS, NetBSD, FreeBSD, & various others
Captured system or network data can be browsed through a GUI, or through the TTY-mode TShark utility
Read/write several variant capture file formats
Captured files compressed via gzip can be de-compressed concurrently
Coloring rules can be applied to the packet list for intuitive and rapid analysis
Live data can be read from Blue-tooth, PPP/HDLC, internet, ATM, Token Ring, USB, etc.,
Outcome can be exported to PostScript, CSV, XML, or plain text
It is a computer security project that offers the user vital information about security risks or vulnerabilities. This framework is an open-source pen test and development platform that offers you access to the recent exploit code for several apps, platforms, and operating systems. Some of the jobs that can be attained in Metasploit from a pen test perspective comprise vulnerability scanning, listening, and exploiting known vulnerabilities, project reporting, and evidence collection. It has a command-line and Graphical User Interface clickable interface that works on Linux, Windows, as well as Apple Mac OS. Metasploit is a commercial tool but it comes with an open-source limited trial.
Core Features:
Network discovery
It has a command-line and GUI interface
Works on Windows, Linux, & Mac OS X
Module browser
Basic exploitation
Manual exploitation
Vulnerability scanner import
Metasploit community edition is offered to the InfoSec community without charge
This commercial security test tool is a web app security scanner. Netsparker is a deadly accurate, automatic, and simple to use web app security scanner. This amazing tool is mainly used to identify security risks automatically like Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL injection in web services, web apps, and websites. Its proof-based Scanning technology does not simply report risks; it also generates a Proof of Concept to confirm they aren’t false positives. Therefore, there is no point in wasting your time by verifying the detect vulnerabilities manually after a scan is ended.
Core Features:
Advanced web scanning
Vulnerability assessment
HTTP request builder
Web services scanning
Proof-centric scanning technology for dead-accurate threats finding and scan outcomes
Full HTML5 support
SDLC integration
Exploitation
Reporting
Manual tests
Automated identification of custom 404 error pages
Anti-Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF) token support
It is a completely automatic web vulnerability scanner that identifies and reports on over 4500 web app vulnerabilities counting all variants of XSS XXE, SSRF, Host Header Injection, and SQL Injection. Acunetix smartly detects around 4500 web vulnerabilities. Acunetix is a commercial tool. Its DeepScan Crawler scans AJAX-heavy client-side SPAs and HTML5 websites. It enables users to export detected vulnerabilities to problem trackers like GitHub, Atlassian JIRA, Microsoft TFS (Team Foundation Server). It is obtainable on Linux, Windows, and Online.
Core Features:
A high detection rate of risks and vulnerabilities with lower false positives
Integrated vulnerability management — organize and control risks
Deeply crawl and scrutinize — automatic scans all websites
Integration with popular WAFs and Issue trackers like GitHub, JIRA, TFS
Open-source network security scanning and Manual test tools
It is a vulnerability assessment solution for security practitioners and it is formed and maintained by a company called Tenable Network Security. Nessus aids in detecting and fixing vulnerabilities like software flaws, malware, missing patches, and misconfigurations across a variety of OSs, apps, and devices. It supports Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris, etc. It specializes in IPs scan, website scanning, compliance checks, Sensitive data searches, etc., and assists to detect the ‘weak-spots’.
Core Features:
Configuration audits
Mobile device audits
Reports can be simply tailored to sort by host or vulnerability, generate an executive summary, or compare scanning outcomes to highlight alterations
Detect vulnerabilities that enable a remote attacker to access confidential data from the system
Identifies both the remote faults of the hosts that are on a network and their local flaws and missing patches as well
It is a Web Application Attack and Audit Framework. W3af is a free tool. W3af secures web apps by searching and exploiting all web app vulnerabilities. It determines 200 or more vulnerabilities and controls your overall risk exposure on the website. It detects all sorts of vulnerabilities such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), SQL injection, unhandled application errors, Guessable Credentials, and PHP misconfigurations. It has both a console and graphical UI. It works on Mac, Linux, and Windows OS.
Core Features:
Assimilation of web and proxy servers into the code
Proxy support
Injecting payloads into roughly every section of the HTTP request
Zed Attack Proxy is a free and open-source security testing tool, developed by OWASP. Popularly known as ZAP, Supported by Unix/Linux, Windows, and Mac OS, ZAP allows you to find a set of security risks and vulnerabilities in web apps, even at the time of the development and testing phase. This tool is simple to use, even if you are a novice in pen-testing.
It is also essentially a scanner (with a restricted “intruder” tool), even though several security test experts swear that penetration test without this tool is unimaginable. It isn’t free, yet very lucrative. It generally works wonders with crawling content and functionality, intercepting proxy, web app scanning, etc. One can use this on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux environments.
It is one of the best open-source penetration testing tools. The aim of Sqlninja is to exploit SQL injection threats and vulnerabilities on a web app. This automated testing tool utilizes Microsoft SQL Server as a back-end. Sqlninja has a command-line interface. Sqlninja works on Linux, as well as Apple Mac OS X. It comes with a slew of descriptive features, counting remote commands, DB fingerprinting, and its detection engine.
Core features:
Direct and reverse shell, both for UDP and TCP
Fingerprinting of the remote SQL Server
Formation of a custom XP cmdshell when the original one has been disabled
Withdrawal of data from the remote Database
Operating System privilege escalation on the remote database server
Reverse scan to seek a port that can be utilized for a reverse shell
These are the top cybersecurity testing tools that will give you security for your personal data, mitigate the rates of data breaches, as well as stolen hardware. Other advantages of these tools count tighter security and greater privacy. These must-have security tools will help you evade cyberattacks and secure your IT infrastructure. Lastly, such security software requires up-gradation and maintenance to constantly have top-notch security.
