Security Testing Tools You Need to Know

April 26 14:21 2017 by Nataliia Vasylyna Print This Article

The statistics of cyber attacks of the recent years shows that hackers broke 1061 blogs and websites in 2015 and 1017 ones in 2016.

But when your website is hacked, then you won’t probably focus on the reason and the way it has happened, but will fully concentrate on fixing all consequences. But still, in order to be on the safe side, you’d better be aware of things that motivate hackers. If to analyze the motivations, the situation is following:

Cybercrime – 72.1%
Hacktivism – 14.2%
Cyber espionage – 9.8%
Cyber warfare – 4.3%
N/A – 0.1%

Often the hackers use the following techniques:

unknown – 33.1%
account hijacking – 15.1%
targeted attack – 11.6%
DDoS – 11.3%
SQLI – 8.4%
malware – 8.0%
defacement – 4.9%
malvertising – 1.8%
malicious iframe/JS – 0.4%

The hackers attack organization in different spheres: entertainment and banking systems, social and financial services, IoT, etc., and this causes much problems. For example, last year, the group of hackers attacked the servers of the game development company Blizzard and cracked three games. In July, emails, logos and IPs of 2 mln users of Ubuntu forums were stolen. The player of Dota 2 were also hacked.

How can you protect your system and users? How to secure your website? A thorough testing of the system security can help you to define the potential vulnerabilities. Security testing and its different types are the inevitable part of every development process. There are a number of tools to test the applications / systems / solutions for penetration, access control, vulnerability and others.

A lot of tools for security checking are available on the market. Here are some of them:

Metasploit is a framework for pen tests on Mac OS, Windows, Linux. It can be used for web apps, servers, networks and more.
Wireshark is used as a network protocol analyzer for different systems: NetBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, OS X, etc.
w3af is an audit framework with fast HTTP requests of various types, integration of proxy servers into the code.
CORE impact is a tool for penetration testing of mobile devices, network, password identification, etc.
Back Track is a Linux tool for Packet sniffing and injecting.
Netsparker is a tool with a web app scanner to discover LFI, SQL injection, and vulnerabilities.
Nessus is a vulnerability scanner for sensitive data searching, websites scanning,
Burpsuite is used as a scanner for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux products.