Top 10 Best Hacking Tools

Hacking always involves tools. A good hacker knows how to use tools to his best advantage. An even better hacker writes his own tools. Here I have listed the top 10 most popular tools used in hacking. It is advisable to master these tools to become a good hacker. Note that all the tools listed here are completely free.


1. Nmap

Nmap is also known as the swiss army knife of hacking. It is the best port scanner with a lot of functions
In hacking, Nmap is usually used in the footprinting phase to scan the ports of the remote computer to find out wich ports are open.


2. Wireshark

Wireshark is a packet sniffer. It captures all network traffic going through a network adapter. When performing man in the middle attacks using tools like Cain, we can use Wireshark to capture the traffic and analyze it for juicy info like usernames and passwords. It is used by network administrators to perform network troubleshooting.

3. Cain and Abel

Cain and Abel is a multipurpose windows only hacking tool. It is a bit old now, but it still does the job well. Cain can be used to crack windows password, perform man in the middle attacks, capture network passwords etc.

4. Metasploit

Metasploit is a huge database of exploits. There are thousands of exploit codes, payloads that can be used to attack web servers or any computer for that matter. This is the ultimate hacking tool that will allow you to actually "hack" a computer. You will be able to get root access to the remote computer and plant backdoors or do any other stuff. It is best to use metasploit under linux.

5. Burp Suite

Burpsuite is a web proxy tool that can be used to test web application security. It can brute force any login form in a browser. You can edit or modify GET and POST data before sending it to the server. It can also be used to automatically detect SQL injection vulnerabilities. It is a good tool to use both under Windows and Linux environments.

6. Aircrack-ng

Aircrack-ng is a set of tools that are used to crack wifi passwords. Using a combination of the tools in  aircrack, you can easily crack WEP passwords. WPA passwords can be cracked using dictionary or brute force.  Although aircrack-ng is available for Windows, it is best to use it under Linux environment. There are many issues if you use it under Windows environment.


8. Nessus

Nessus is a comprehensive  automatic vulnerability scanner.  You have to give it an IP address as input and it will scan that IP address to find out the vulnerabilities in that system. Once you know the vulnerabllities, you can use metasploit to exploit the vulnerablity. Nessus works both in Windows and Linux.



10. THC Hydra

Hydra is a fast password cracker tool. It cracks passwords of remote systems through the network. It can crack passwords of many protocols including ftp,http, smtp etc. You have the option to supply a dictionary file which contains possible passwords. It is best to use hydra under linux environment.

9. Netcat

Netcat is a great networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using the TCP/IP protocol. It is also known as the swiss army knife for TCP/IP. This is because netcat is extremely versatile and can perform almost anything related to TCP/IP. In a hacking scenario, it can be used as a backdoor to access hacked computers remotely. The use of netcat is limited only by the user's imagination. Find out more about netcat at the official website.

10. Putty

Although putty is not a hacking software by itself, it is a very useful tool for a hacker. It is a client for SSH and telnet, which can be used to connect to remote computers. You may use putty when you want to connect to your Backtrack machine from your Windows PC.  It can also be used to perform SSH tunneling to bypass firewalls.

Note: This list is not comprehensive. There are many tools that I have left out. Those tools that did not make the list are; Sqlmap, Havij, Acunetix Web Scanner, SuperScan, John the Ripper, Kismet, Hping3.
I have written another article about the top 5 website hacking tools.

Have you always wanted to know how to become a hacker? Great! Read this article and learn how to become a hacker.