Yekaterina Voyakina

Notepad++ is a free (as in “free speech” and also as in “free beer”) source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GNU General Public License.

Based on the powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment.

Acunetix was founded by Nick Galea in 2005. It came at a time when the majority of enterprises focused on network protection rather than securing web applications. With the goal of combating web vulnerabilities, Acunetix aimed to offer an automated tool to scan web applications to identify and resolve security issues. Simply put, Acunetix is an all-in-one website security scanner.

The vulnerability scanner was originally built for Windows. In 2014, Acunetix offered an online version and then Linux in 2018. Over the years the company has grown its services. Currently, Acunetix serves over 6,000 companies worldwide.

Acunetix includes quite a few features for enterprises.

Cloud computing and browser technology have seen significant growth in recent times. In the business environment, these are often vital components. This very reason paints a huge target in the sector. Hackers continue to focus on this area.

Yes, firewalls and SSL certificates can help beef up web application security. But these measures are only basic. Regardless of the HTTP of HTTPS, web attacks are still carried out by hackers. As Acunetix puts it, their vulnerability scanner has the capability of detecting over 4500 web application vulnerabilities. It can also scan open-source software and custom-built applications.

The Acunetix vulnerability scanner comes equipped with DeepScan. This enables crawling AJAX-heavy client-side single-page applications. The AcuSensor combines black box scanning methodologies with feedback from its sensors placed inside source code. The company also claims, “Industry’s most advanced SQL Injection and Cross-site Scripting (XSS) testing including advanced detection of DOM-based XSS”. Furthermore, its Login Sequence Recorder facilitates the automatic scanning of complex password-protected areas.

It doesn’t stop there. The vulnerability scanner also includes a vulnerability management tool. This provides many technical and compliance reports.

We previously talked about penetration testing. Acunetix’s offering is an automated penetration testing tool. While it’s true that manual testing would provide organizations with a thorough security assessment. But oftentimes these are time consuming and expensive. Hence, the use of automated penetration testing tools, like Acunetix’s web vulnerability scanner, is much more efficient.

Acunetix allows security personnel to test for SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting, and other vulnerabilities. It also allows for scheduled automated scans as well. Additionally, it also has the capability of offering full support for modern Single Page Applications.

Here, the penetration testing tools are able to understand and test applications dependent on JavaScript frameworks such as Angular and React. What this means is that the penetration testing tools can scan everything from legacy web applications built on traditional stacks to modern web apps.

The reporting element is also a valuable add on for enterprises. The software can generate a wide range of reports such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, OWASP Top 10, etc. Additionally, if users discover any vulnerabilities, they could export these to issue trackers like Atlassian JIRA, GitHub, and Microsoft Team Foundation Server.

When it comes to web application security, one of the first things to do is to scan for known vulnerabilities. Acunetix would enable quick and easy identification of known vulnerabilities. This includes sites built with HTML5 and JavaScript Single Page Applications, which can be sometimes hard to scan.

When it comes to testing approaches, Acunetix is not limited to black-box testing techniques. Among the many elements of Acunetix is the AcuSensor grey-box scanning technology. This lets users automatically assess executed Java, ASP.NET and PHP server-side code.

When it comes to network security, insecure network perimeters remain the cause of many data breaches. Thereby, this tool would help users discover open ports and running services, and test for more than 50,000 known network vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Acunetix would also allow users to analyze the security of routers, switches, load balancers, and the likes. Additionally, the network security scanner element comes equipped with a few more capabilities such as testing for,

• Weak passwords: FTP, IMAP, database servers, POP3, Socks, SSH, and Telnet
• Badly configured proxy servers
• Anonymous FTP access and writable directories over FTP
• Weak TLS/SSL ciphers

WordPress is one of the most popular Contents Management Systems today. It’s said that there are roughly 75,000,000 WordPress sites operational as of this moment. The system’s many mechanisms such as plugins, themes, and user-friendly content management makes WordPress a top choice for most people. Unfortunately, this also makes WordPress a promising target for hackers. Enter the Acunetix WordPress vulnerability scanner. According to the company, this has the capability to,

• Detect outdated WordPress versions, including WordPress core and plugins without critical security patches
• Identify malware that is sometimes under the guise of WordPress themes and third-party plugins
• Detect WordPress usernames that can be used to compromise accounts
• Discover disclosed publicly available wp-config.php files
• Identify if vulnerable to XML-RPC brute force attacks

Cherrytree is a powerful feature rich Wiki-like hierarchical note taking application that lets you organize all your notes, bookmarks, source codes and other personal information in a database.

The application is a personal (desktop) wiki system that saves all your data into an XML file, it supports a large range of source code (ASP, C, Java, JavaScript, LaTeX, Pascal, Perl, PHP, etc.) types, enables syntax highlighting, paragraph formatting and alignment, image, table, list and codebox insertion and management.

The software also lets users define hyperlinks (these can be linked to Web pages, to nodes or to files), print and export nodes to PDF format, organize the structure of nodes, search them using regular expressions, replace text strings in notes or in the names of nodes, import data from Notecase, Tuxcards, Basket and Keepnote notebooks.

Cherrytree has a very nice, fast, customizable, intuitive interface, it includes an Undo function (lets you reverse the typed text to an older state), supports table editing and importing / exporting (as CSV file), line wrapping, auto-saving and is available in multiple languages.

Vega is a free and open source web security scanner and web security testing platform to test the security of web applications. Vega can help you find and validate SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), inadvertently disclosed sensitive information, and other vulnerabilities. It is written in Java, GUI based, and runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows.

Vega can help you find vulnerabilities such as: reflected cross-site scripting, stored cross-site scripting, blind SQL injection, remote file include, shell injection, and others. Vega also probes for TLS / SSL security settings and identifies opportunities for improving the security of your TLS servers.

Vega includes an automated scanner for quick tests and an intercepting proxy for tactical inspection. The Vega scanner finds XSS (cross-site scripting), SQL injection, and other vulnerabilities. Vega can be extended using a powerful API in the language of the web: Javascript.

Automated Scanner

Vega includes a website crawler powering its automated scanner. Vega can automatically log into websites when supplied with user credentials.

Intercepting Proxy

Vega can be used to observe and interact with communication between clients and servers, and will perform SSL interception for HTTP websites.

Proxy Scanner

The Vega proxy can also be configured to run attack modules while the user is browsing the target site through it. This allows for semi-automated, user-driven security testing to ensure maximum code coverage.

Cain and Abel (often abbreviated to Cain) was a password recovery tool for Microsoft Windows. It could recover many kinds of passwords using methods such as network packet sniffing, cracking various password hashes by using methods such as dictionary attacks, brute force and cryptanalysis attacks. Cryptanalysis attacks were done via rainbow tables which could be generated with the winrtgen.exe program provided with Cain and Abel. Cain and Abel was maintained by Massimiliano Montoro and Sean Babcock.

Nikto is an Open Source (GPL) web server scanner which performs comprehensive tests against web servers for multiple items, including over 6700 potentially dangerous files/programs, checks for outdated versions of over 1250 servers, and version specific problems on over 270 servers. It also checks for server configuration items such as the presence of multiple index files, HTTP server options, and will attempt to identify installed web servers and software. Scan items and plugins are frequently updated and can be automatically updated.

Nikto is not designed as a stealthy tool. It will test a web server in the quickest time possible, and is obvious in log files or to an IPS/IDS. However, there is support for LibWhisker's anti-IDS methods in case you want to give it a try (or test your IDS system).

Not every check is a security problem, though most are. There are some items that are "info only" type checks that look for things that may not have a security flaw, but the webmaster or security engineer may not know are present on the server. These items are usually marked appropriately in the information printed. There are also some checks for unknown items which have been seen scanned for in log files.

Nikto can detect over 6700 potentially dangerous files/CGIs, checks for outdated versions of over 1250 servers, and version specific problems on over 270 servers. It also checks for server configuration items such as the presence of multiple index files and HTTP server options, and will attempt to identify installed web servers and software. Scan items and plugins are frequently updated and can be automatically updated.

PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. PuTTY is open source software that is available with source code and is developed and supported by a group of volunteers.

PuTTY is a client program for the SSH, Telnet, Rlogin, and SUPDUP network protocols.

These protocols are all used to run a remote session on a computer, over a network. PuTTY implements the client end of that session: the end at which the session is displayed, rather than the end at which it runs.

In really simple terms: you run PuTTY on a Windows machine, and tell it to connect to (for example) a Unix machine. PuTTY opens a window. Then, anything you type into that window is sent straight to the Unix machine, and everything the Unix machine sends back is displayed in the window. So you can work on the Unix machine as if you were sitting at its console, while actually sitting somewhere else.

Hydra is a parallelized network login cracker built in various operating systems like Kali Linux, Parrot and other major penetration testing environments. Hydra works by using different approaches to perform brute-force attacks in order to guess the right username and password combination. Hydra is commonly used by penetration testers together with a set of programmes like crunch, cupp etc, which are used to generate wordlists. Hydra is then used to test the attacks using the wordlists that these programmes created.

Hydra is a parallelized login cracker which supports numerous protocols to attack. It is very fast and flexible, and new modules are easy to add.

This tool makes it possible for researchers and security consultants to show how easy it would be to gain unauthorized access to a system remotely.

It supports: Cisco AAA, Cisco auth, Cisco enable, CVS, FTP, HTTP(S)-FORM-GET, HTTP(S)-FORM-POST, HTTP(S)-GET, HTTP(S)-HEAD, HTTP-Proxy, ICQ, IMAP, IRC, LDAP, MS-SQL, MySQL, NNTP, Oracle Listener, Oracle SID, PC-Anywhere, PC-NFS, POP3, PostgreSQL, RDP, Rexec, Rlogin, Rsh, SIP, SMB(NT), SMTP, SMTP Enum, SNMP v1+v2+v3, SOCKS5, SSH (v1 and v2), SSHKEY, Subversion, Teamspeak (TS2), Telnet, VMware-Auth, VNC and XMPP.

DirBuster is a multi threaded java application designed to brute force directories and files names on web/application servers. Often is the case now of what looks like a web server in a state of default installation is actually not, and has pages and applications hidden within. DirBuster attempts to find these.

However tools of this nature are often as only good as the directory and file list they come with. A different approach was taken to generating this. The list was generated from scratch, by crawling the Internet and collecting the directory and files that are actually used by developers! DirBuster comes a total of 9 different lists, this makes DirBuster extremely effective at finding those hidden files and directories. And if that was not enough DirBuster also has the option to perform a pure brute force, which leaves the hidden directories and files nowhere to hide.

Ncat is a feature-packed networking utility which reads and writes data across networks from the command line. Ncat was written for the Nmap Project as a much-improved reimplementation of the venerable Netcat. It uses both TCP and UDP for communication and is designed to be a reliable back-end tool to instantly provide network connectivity to other applications and users. Ncat will not only work with IPv4 and IPv6 but provides the user with a virtually limitless number of potential uses.

Among Ncat’s vast number of features there is the ability to chain Ncats together, redirect both TCP and UDP ports to other sites, SSL support, and proxy connections via SOCKS4 or HTTP (CONNECT method) proxies (with optional proxy authentication as well). Some general principles apply to most applications and thus give you the capability of instantly adding networking support to software that would normally never support it.