50+ Network Penetration Testing Tools for Hackers & Security Professionals – 2024

Network Security tools for Penetration testing is more often used by security industries to test the vulnerabilities in network and applications.

Here you can find the Comprehensive Network Security Tools list that covers Performing Penetration testing Operations in all Environments.

Learn: Master in Ethical Hacking & Penetration Testing Online – Scratch to Advance Level

Table of Content

Network Security Tools
Scanning / Pentesting
Monitoring / Logging
IDS / IPS / Host IDS / Host IPS
Honey Pot / Honey Net
Full Packet Capture / Forensic
Sniffer-based Network Security Tools
SIEM – Network Security Tools
VPN
Fast Packet Processing
Firewall-based Network Security Tools
Anti-Spam
Docker Images for Penetration Testing & Security

Network Security Tools

Scanning / Pentesting

• Vulnerability Manager Plus – It is an integrated threat and vulnerability management solution that secures your enterprise network from exploits by instantly detecting vulnerabilities and remediating them.
• OpenVAS – OpenVAS is a framework of several services and tools offering a comprehensive and powerful vulnerability scanning and vulnerability management solution.
• Metasploit Framework – one of the best Network Security Tools for developing and executing exploit code against a remote target machine. Other important sub-projects include the Opcode Database, shellcode archive, and related research.
• Kali – Kali Linux is a Debian-derived Linux distribution designed for digital forensics and penetration testing. Kali Linux is preinstalled with numerous penetration-testing programs, including nmap (a port scanner), Wireshark (a packet analyzer), John the Ripper (a password cracker), and Aircrack-ng (a software suite for penetration-testing wireless LANs).
• pig – A Linux packet crafting tool.
• scapy – Scapy: the Python-based interactive packet manipulation program & library.
• Pompem – Pompem is an open-source Network Security Tools, which is designed to automate the search for exploits in major databases. Developed in Python, has a system of advanced search, thus facilitating the work of pentesters and ethical hackers. In its current version, performs searches in databases: Exploit-db, 1337day, Packetstorm Security…
• Nmap – Nmap is a free and open-source utility for network discovery and security auditing.

Monitoring / Logging

• justniffer – Justniffer is a network protocol analyzer that captures network traffic and produces logs in a customized way, can emulate Apache web server log files, track response times, and extract all “intercepted” files from the HTTP traffic.
• httpry – httpry is a specialized packet sniffer designed for displaying and logging HTTP traffic. It is not intended to perform analysis itself, but to capture, parse, and log the traffic for later analysis. It can be run in real-time displaying the traffic as it is parsed, or as a daemon process that logs to an output file. It is written to be as lightweight and flexible as possible so that it can be easily adaptable to different applications.
• ngrep – ngrep strives to provide most of GNU grep’s common features, applying them to the network layer. ngrep is a pcap-aware tool that will allow you to specify extended regular or hexadecimal expressions to match against data payloads of packets. It currently recognizes IPv4/6, TCP, UDP, ICMPv4/6, IGMP, and Raw across Ethernet, PPP, SLIP, FDDI, Token Ring and null interfaces, and understands BPF filter logic in the same fashion as more common packet sniffing tools, such as tcpdump and snoop.
• passivedns – one of the best Network Security Tools to collect DNS records passively to aid Incident handling, Network Security Monitoring (NSM) and general digital forensics. PassiveDNS sniffs traffic from an interface or reads a pcap-file and outputs the DNS-server answers to a log file. PassiveDNS can cache/aggregate duplicate DNS answers in-memory, limiting the amount of data in the logfile without loosing the essens in the DNS answer.
• sagan – Sagan uses a ‘Snort like’ engine and rules to analyze logs (syslog/event log/snmptrap/netflow/etc).
• Node Security Platform – Similar feature set to Snyk, but free in most cases, and very cheap for others.
• ntopng – Ntopng is a network traffic probe that shows the network usage, similar to what the popular top Unix command does.
• Fibratus – Fibratus is a tool for exploration and tracing of the Windows kernel. It is able to capture the most of the Windows kernel activity – process/thread creation and termination, file system I/O, registry, network activity, DLL loading/unloading and much more. Fibratus has a very simple CLI which encapsulates the machinery to start the kernel event stream collector, set kernel event filters or run the lightweight Python modules called filaments.

Also Read: Most Important Android Security Penetration Testing Tools for Hackers & Security Professionals

IDS / IPS / Host IDS / Host IPS

• Snort – Snort is a free and open-source network intrusion prevention system (NIPS) and network intrusion detection system (NIDS)created by Martin Roesch in 1998. Snort is now developed by Sourcefire, of which Roesch is the founder and CTO. In 2009, Snort entered InfoWorld’s Open Source Hall of Fame as one of the “greatest [pieces of] open source software of all time”.
• Bro – Bro is a powerful network analysis framework that is much different from the typical IDS you may know.
• OSSEC – Comprehensive Open Source HIDS. Not for the faint of heart. Takes a bit to get your head around how it works. Performs log analysis, file integrity checking, policy monitoring, rootkit detection, real-time alerting, and active response. It runs on most operating systems, including Linux, MacOS, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Windows. Plenty of reasonable documentation. The sweet spot is medium to large deployments.
• Suricata – Suricata is a high-performance Network IDS, IPS, and Network Security Monitoring engine. Open Source and owned by a community-run non-profit foundation, the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF). Suricata is developed by the OISF and its supporting vendors.
• Security Onion – Security Onion is a Linux distro for intrusion detection, network security monitoring, and log management. It’s based on Ubuntu and contains Snort, Suricata, Bro, OSSEC, Sguil, Squert, Snorby, ELSA, Xplico, NetworkMiner, and many other security tools. The easy-to-use Setup wizard allows you to build an army of distributed sensors for your enterprise in minutes!
• sshwatch – IPS for SSH similar to DenyHosts written in Python. It also can gather information about the attacker during the attack in a log.
• Stealth – File integrity checker that leaves virtually no sediment. The controller runs from another machine, which makes it hard for an attacker to know that the file system is being checked at defined pseudo-random intervals over SSH. Highly recommended for small to medium deployments.
• AIEngine – AIEngine is a next-generation interactive/programmable Python/Ruby/Java/Lua packet inspection engine with capabilities of learning without any human intervention, NIDS(Network Intrusion Detection System) functionality, DNS domain classification, network collector, network forensics, and many others.
• Denyhosts – Thwart SSH dictionary-based attacks and brute force attacks.
• Fail2Ban – Scans log files and take action on IPs that show malicious behavior.
• SSHGuard – A software to protect services in addition to SSH, written in C
• Lynis – an open-source security auditing tool for Linux/Unix.

Honey Pot / Honey Net

• HoneyPy – HoneyPy is a low to medium-interaction honeypot. It is intended to be easy to: deploy, extend functionality with plugins, and apply custom configurations.
• Dionaea – Dionaea is meant to be a Nepenthes successor, embedding Python as a scripting language, using libemu to detect shellcodes, and supporting ipv6 and tls.
• Conpot – ICS/SCADA Honeypot. Conpot is a low interactive server-side Industrial Control Systems honeypot designed to be easy to deploy, modify, and extend. By providing a range of common industrial control protocols we created the basics to build your own system, capable of emulating complex infrastructures to convince an adversary that he just found a huge industrial complex
• Amun – Amun Python-based low-interaction Honeypot.
• Glastopf – Glastopf is a Honeypot that emulates thousands of vulnerabilities to gather data from attacks targeting web applications. The principle behind it is very simple: Reply the correct response to the attacker exploiting the web application.
• Kippo – Kippo is a medium interaction SSH honeypot designed to log brute force attacks and, most importantly, the entire shell interaction performed by the attacker.
• Kojoney – Kojoney is a low-level interaction honeypot that emulates an SSH server. The daemon is written in Python using the Twisted Conch libraries.
• HonSSH – HonSSH is a high-interaction Honey Pot solution. HonSSH will sit between an attacker and a honey pot, creating two separate SSH connections between them.
• Bifrozt – Bifrozt is a NAT device with a DHCP server that is usually deployed with one NIC connected directly to the Internet and one NIC connected to the internal network. What differentiates Bifrozt from other standard NAT devices is its ability to work as a transparent SSHv2 proxy between an attacker and your honeypot.
• HoneyDrive – HoneyDrive is the premier honeypot Linux distro. It is a virtual appliance (OVA) with Xubuntu Desktop 12.04.4 LTS edition installed. It contains over 10 pre-installed and pre-configured honeypot software packages such as Kippo SSH honeypot, Dionaea and Amun malware honeypots, Honeyd low-interaction honeypot, Glastopf web honeypot and Wordpot, Conpot SCADA/ICS honeypot, Thug and PhoneyC honey clients and more.
• Cuckoo Sandbox – Cuckoo Sandbox is an Open Source software for automating the analysis of suspicious files. To do so it makes use of custom components that monitor the behavior of the malicious processes while running in an isolated environment.

Full Packet Capture / Forensic

• tcpflow – tcpflow is a program that captures data transmitted as part of TCP connections (flows) and stores the data in a way that is convenient for protocol analysis and debugging.
• Xplico – The goal of Xplico is to extract from internet traffic and capture the application’s data contained. For example, from a pcap file Xplico extracts each email (POP, IMAP, and SMTP protocols), all HTTP contents, each VoIP call (SIP), FTP, TFTP, and so on. Xplico isn’t a network protocol analyzer. Xplico is an open-source Network Forensic Analysis Tool (NFAT).
• Moloch – Moloch is an open-source, large-scale IPv4 packet capturing (PCAP), indexing, and database system. A simple web interface is provided for PCAP browsing, searching, and exporting. APIs are exposed that allow PCAP data and JSON-formatted session data to be downloaded directly. Simple security is implemented by using HTTPS and HTTP digest password support or by using Apache in front. Moloch is not meant to replace IDS engines but instead work alongside them to store and index all the network traffic in standard PCAP format, providing fast access. Moloch is built to be deployed across many systems and can scale to handle multiple gigabits/sec of traffic.
• OpenFPC – OpenFPC is a set of tools that combine to provide a lightweight full-packet network traffic recorder & buffering system. Its design goal is to allow non-expert users to deploy a distributed network traffic recorder on COTS hardware while integrating it into existing alert and log management tools.
• Dshell – Dshell is a network forensic analysis framework. Enables rapid development of plugins to support the dissection of network packet captures.
• stenographer – Stenographer is a packet capture solution that aims to quickly spool all packets to disk, then provide simple, fast access to subsets of those packets.

Sniffer-based Network Security Tools

• Wireshark – Wireshark is a free and open-source packet analyzer. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software, and communications protocol development, and education. Wireshark is very similar to tcpdump, but has a graphical front-end, plus some integrated sorting and filtering options.
• netsniff-ng – netsniff-ng is a free Linux networking toolkit, a Swiss army knife for your daily Linux network plumbing if you will. Its gain of performance is reached by zero-copy mechanisms so that on packet reception and transmission the kernel does not need to copy packets from kernel space to user space and vice versa.
• Live HTTP headers – Live HTTP headers is a free Firefox addon to see your browser requests in real-time. It shows the entire headers of the requests and can be used to find security loopholes in implementations.

SIEM – Network Security Tools

• Prelude – Prelude is a Universal “Security Information & Event Management” (SIEM) system. Prelude collects, normalizes, sorts, aggregates, correlates, and reports all security-related events independently of the product brand or license giving rise to such events; Prelude is “agentless”.
• OSSIM – OSSIM provides all of the features that a security professional needs from a SIEM offering – event collection, normalization, and correlation.
• FIR – Fast Incident Response, a cybersecurity incident management platform.

VPN

• OpenVPN – OpenVPN is an open-source software application that implements virtual private network (VPN) techniques for creating secure point-to-point or site-to-site connections in routed or bridged configurations and remote access facilities.
• It uses a custom security protocol that utilizes SSL/TLS for key exchange.

Fast Packet Processing

• DPDK – DPDK is a set of libraries and drivers for fast packet processing.
• PFQ – PFQ is a functional networking framework designed for the Linux operating system that allows efficient packet capture/transmission (10G and beyond), in-kernel functional processing, and packet steering across sockets/endpoints.
• PF_RING – PF_RING is a new type of network socket that dramatically improves the packet capture speed.
• PF_RING ZC (Zero Copy) – PF_RING ZC (Zero Copy) is a flexible packet processing framework that allows you to achieve 1/10 Gbit line rate packet processing (both RX and TX) at any packet size. It implements zero copy operations including patterns for inter-process and inter-VM (KVM) communications.
• PACKET_MMAP/TPACKET/AF_PACKET – It’s fine to use PACKET_MMAP to improve the performance of the capture and transmission process in Linux.
• netmap – net map is a framework for high-speed packet I/O. Together with its companion VALE software switch, it is implemented as a single kernel module and available for FreeBSD, Linux, and now also Windows.

Firewall-based Network Security Tools

• pfSense – Firewall and Router FreeBSD distribution.
• OPNsense – is an open-source, easy-to-use, and easy-to-build FreeBSD-based firewall and routing platform. OPNsense includes most of the features available in expensive commercial firewalls, and more in many cases. It brings a rich feature set of commercial offerings with the benefits of open and verifiable sources.
• fwknop – Protects ports via Single Packet Authorization in your firewall.

Anti-Spam

• SpamAssassin – A powerful and popular email spam filter employing a variety of detection techniques.

Docker Images for Penetration Testing & Security

• docker pull kalilinux/kali-linux-docker official Kali Linux
• docker pull owasp/zap2docker-stable – official OWASP ZAP
• docker pull wpscanteam/wpscan – official WPScan
• docker pull remnux/metasploit – docker-metasploit
• docker pull citizenstig/dvwa – Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA)
• docker pull wpscanteam/vulnerablewordpress – Vulnerable WordPress Installation
• docker pull hmlio/vaas-cve-2014-6271 – Vulnerability as a service: Shellshock
• docker pull hmlio/vaas-cve-2014-0160 – Vulnerability as a service: Heartbleed
• docker pull opendns/security-ninjas – Security Ninjas
• docker pull diogomonica/docker-bench-security – Docker Bench for Security
• docker pull ismisepaul/securityshepherd – OWASP Security Shepherd
• docker pull danmx/docker-owasp-webgoat – OWASP WebGoat Project docker image
• docker-compose build && docker-compose up – OWASP NodeGoat
• docker pull citizenstig/nowasp – OWASP Mutillidae II Web Pen-Test Practice Application

You can follow us on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook for daily Cybersecurity updates also you can take the Best Cybersecurity courses online to keep your self-updated.