What Is Penetration Testing?

Penetration testing, also called pen testing, security pen testing, or security testing, is ethical, or
white hat, hacking. Pen testing breaks through an organization's cyber defenses to check for
exploitable vulnerabilities in networks, user security, and web applications.

To evaluate a computer system's effectiveness, pen testers launch simulated cyberattacks against

targeted networks (and with the host's knowledge). In addition, these ethical hackers look for
ways around the computer system's defenses, checking for ways to gain access.

These attacks help organizations locate the weak spots in their network infrastructure and help
guide efforts to ramp up security.

What Is Kali Linux?

Kali Linux is an open-source distribution designed for cybersecurity professionals, ethical

hackers, and penetration testers. It is Debian-derived and focused on providing over 600 tools for
penetration testing and security auditing. Offensive Security actively developed Kali Linux and
is one of the most popular security distributions used by ethical hackers and Infosec companies.

Kali Linux was designed to be used by professionals, web admins, and anyone who knows how
to run Kali Linux; it was not designed for general use.

Kali Linux has numerous security-hacker applications pre-installed for exploitation tools,
forensic tools, hardware hacking, information gathering, password cracking, reverse engineering,
wireless attacks, web applications, stress testing, sniffing and spoofing, vulnerability analysis,
and many more. You can even install additional tools.

Since hundreds of tools are available, we've decided to offer you this shortlist of the better tools
to use this year. This way, you don't have to spend hours wading through the vast collection,
trying to find the best Kali Linux tools. We've done the heavy lifting for you. You're welcome!
The Top Eight Kali Linux Tools

Here are the best eight penetration tools to get you through 2022. Notice that they cover
a diverse range of techniques and attacks.

1. Fluxion

Wi-Fi is growing more popular each year, making it a more attractive target of
opportunity for hackers. That's why pen testers must have the capacity to test Wi-Fi
networks for security leaks.

Fluxion is a Wi-Fi analyzer specializing in MITM WPA attacks and lets you scan
wireless networks. Pen testers use Fluxion to search for security flaws in corporate and
personal networks. However, unlike similar Wi-Fi cracking tools, Fluxion does not
launch time-consuming brute force cracking attempts.

Instead, Fluxion creates an MDK3 process that forces all users on the targeted network
to lose authentication or deauthenticate. Once this is accomplished, the user is
prompted to connect to a false access point, requiring entering the Wi-Fi password.
Then, the program reports the password to the pen tester to gain access.

2. John the Ripper

John the Ripper gets points for a creative name. This hacker’s resource is a multi-
platform cryptography testing tool that works equally well on Linux, Windows, macOS,
and Unix. It enables system administrators and security penetration testers to test the
strength of any system password by launching brute force attacks. Additionally, John
the Ripper can be used to test encryptions like DES, SHA-1, and many others.

Its ability to change password decryption methods is set automatically and contingent
on the detected algorithms.

John the Ripper is a free tool, licensed and distributed under the GPL license, and ideal
for anyone who wants to test their organization’s password security.

John the Ripper’s chief advantages include:

 Brute force testing and dictionary attacks

 Compatibility with most operating systems and CPU architectures

 Running automatically by using crons

 Allowing Pause and Resume options for any scan

 It lets hackers define custom letters while building dictionary attack lists

 It allows brute force customization rules

3. Lynis

Lynis is most likely one of the most comprehensive tools available

for cybersecurity compliance (e.g., PCI, HIPAA, SOx), system auditing, system
hardening, and testing. In addition, thanks to its numerous capabilities, Lynis also
functions as an effective platform for vulnerability scanning and penetration testing.

This Kali Linux tool’s main features include:

 Open source and free, with commercial support available.

 Simple installation from the Github repository.

 It runs on multiple platforms (BSD, macOS, Linux, BSD, AIX, and more).

 It can run up to 300 security tests on the remote host.

 Its output report is shared on-screen and features suggestions, warnings, and any critical
security issues found on the machine.

4. Metasploit Framework

Remote computing is on the rise thanks to more people working from home. Metasploit
Framework, or MSF for short, is a Ruby-based platform used by ethical hackers to
develop, test, and execute exploits against remote hosts. Metasploit includes a
complete collection of security tools intended for penetration testing, plus a powerful
terminal-based console known as msfconsole, which lets you find targets, exploit
security flaws, launch scans, and collect all relevant available data.

Available for Windows and Linux, MSF is most likely one of the most potent security
auditing Kali Linux tools freely available for cybersecurity professionals.

Metasploit Framework’s features include:

 Network enumeration and discovery

 Evading detection on remote hosts

 Exploiting development and execution

 Scanning remote targets

 Exploiting vulnerabilities and collecting valuable data 

5. Nikto

Nikto enables ethical hackers and pen testers to conduct a complete web server scan to
discover security vulnerabilities and related flaws. This scan collects results by detecting
default file names, insecure file and app patterns, outdated server software, and server
and software misconfigurations.

Written in Perl, Nikto complements OpenVAS and other vulnerability scanners. In

addition, it features support for host-based authentication, proxies, SSL encryption, and
more.

Nikto’s primary features include:

 Scanning multiple ports on a server.

 Providing IDS evasion techniques.

 Outputting results into TXT, XML, HTML, NBE or CSV.

 Apache and cgiwrap username enumeration.

 Identifying installed software via headers, files, and favicons.

 Scanning specified CGI directories.

 Using custom configuration files.

6. Nmap

Nmap is the most well-known network mapper tool in IT circles. It lets you discover
active hosts within any network and gain additional information related to penetration
testing, such as existing open ports.

Nmap main features include:

 Host discovery, which identifies hosts in any network

 Port scanning lets you enumerate open ports on either a local or remote host

 OS detection helps gather operating system and hardware info about any connected device

 App version detection lets you determine the application name and version numbers
 Scriptable interaction extends the Nmap default capabilities by using the Nmap Scripting
Engine (or NSE)

7. Skipfish

Skipfish is a Kali Linux tool like WPScan, but instead of only focusing on WordPress,
Skipfish scans many web applications. Skipfish acts as an effective auditing tool for
crawling web-based data, giving pen testers a quick insight into how insecure any app
is.

Skipfish performs recursive crawl and dictionary-based tests over all URLs, using its
recon capabilities. The crawl creates a digital map of security checks and their results.

Noteworthy Skipfish features include:

 Automated learning capabilities.

 Differential security checks.

 Easy to use.

 A low false positive ratio.

 The ability to run high-speed security checks, with over 200 requests per second.

8. Social Engineering Toolkit

If you are ever interested in hacking social network accounts, we have just the tool for
you! The Social Engineering Toolkit, also known as SET, is an open-source Python-
based penetration testing framework that helps you quickly and easily launch social-
engineering attacks. It runs on Linux and Mac OS X.

SET is an indispensable Kali Linux tool for hackers and pen testers interested in
working with social engineering.

Here are the kinds of attacks you can launch with the Social Engineering Toolkit:

 Wi-Fi AP-based attacks, which redirect or intercept packets from Wi-Fi network users

 SMS and email attacks, here, which attempt to trick and generate fake emails to harvest
social credentials

 Web-based attacks, which lets hackers clone a web page to drive real users by DNS
spoofing and phishing attacks
 Creation of payloads (.exe), which creates a malicious .exe file that, once executed,
compromises the system of any user who clicks on it

21 Best Kali Linux Tools for Hacking and Penetration Testing

Here’s our list of best Kali Linux tools that will allow you to assess the security of web-servers
and help in performing hacking and pen-testing.
There are several types of tools that comes pre-installed. If you do not find a tool installed,
simply download it and set it up. It’s easy.
1. Nmap
Nmap or “Network Mapper” is one of the most popular tools on Kali Linux for information
gathering. In other words, to get insights about the host, its IP address, OS detection, and similar
network security details (like the number of open ports and what they are).
It also offers features for firewall evasion and spoofing.
2. Lynis
Lynis is a powerful tool for security auditing, compliance testing, and system hardening. Of
course, you can also utilize this for vulnerability detection and penetration testing as well.
It will scan the system according to the components it detects. For example, if it detects Apache
– it will run Apache-related tests for pin point information.
3. WPScan
WordPress is one of the best open source CMS and this would be the best free WordPress
security auditing tool. It’s free but not open source.
If you want to know whether a WordPress blog is vulnerable in some way, WPScan is your
friend.
In addition, it also gives you details of the plugins active. Of course, a well-secured blog may not
give you a lot of details, but it is still the best tool for WordPress security scans to find potential
vulnerabilities.
4. Aircrack-ng
Aircrack-ng is a collection of tools to assess WiFi network security. It isn’t just limited to
monitor and get insights – but it also includes the ability to compromise a network (WEP, WPA
1, and WPA 2).
If you forgot the password of your own WiFi network – you can try using this to regain access. It
also includes a variety of wireless attacks with which you can target/monitor a WiFi network to
enhance its security.
5. Hydra
If you are looking for an interesting tool to crack login/password pairs, Hydra will be one of the
best Kali Linux tools that comes pre-installed.
It may not be actively maintained anymore – but it is now on GitHub, so you can contribute
working on it as well.
6. Wireshark
Wireshark is the most popular network analyzer that comes baked in with Kali Linux. It can be
categorized as one of the best Kali Linux tools for network sniffing as well.
It is being actively maintained, so I would definitely recommend trying this out. And it’s really
easy to install Wireshark on Linux.
7. Metasploit Framework
Metsploit Framework is the most used penetration testing framework. It offers two editions – one
(open source) and the second is the pro version to it. With this tool, you can verify
vulnerabilities, test known exploits, and perform a complete security assessment.
Of course, the free version won’t have all the features, so if you are into serious stuff, you should
compare the editions here.
8. Skipfish
Similar to WPScan, but not just focused for WordPress. Skipfish is a web application scanner
that would give you insights for almost every type of web applications. It’s fast and easy to use.
In addition, its recursive crawl method makes it even better.
For professional web application security assessments, the report generated by Skipfish will
come in handy.
9. Maltego
Maltego is an impressive data mining tool to analyze information online and connect the dots (if
any). As per the information, it creates a directed graph to help analyze the link between those
pieces of data.
Do note, that this isn’t an open source tool.
It comes pre-installed, however, you will have to sign up in order to select which edition you
want to use. If you want for personal use, the community edition will suffice (you just need to
register for an account) but if you want to utilize for commercial purpose, you need the
subscription to the classic or XL version.
10. Nessus
If you have a computer connected to a network, Nessus can help find vulnerabilities that a
potential attacker may take advantage of. Of course, if you are an administrator for multiple
computers connected to a network, you can make use of it and secure those computers.
However, this is not a free tool anymore, you can try it free for 7 days on from its official
website.
11. Burp Suite Scanner
Burp Suite Scanner is a fantastic web security analysis tool. Unlike other web application
security scanner, Burp offers a GUI and quite a few advanced tools.
However, the community edition restricts the features to only some essential manual tools. For
professionals, you will have to consider upgrading. Similar to the previous tool, this isn’t open
source either.
I’ve used the free version, but if you want more details on it, you should check out the features
available on their official website.
12. BeEF
BeEF (Browser Exploitation Framework) is yet another impressive tool. It has been tailored for
penetration testers to assess the security of a web browser.
This is one of the best Kali Linux tools because a lot of users do want to know and fix the client-
side problems when talking about web security.
13. Apktool
Apktool is indeed one of the popular tools found on Kali Linux for reverse engineering Android
apps. Of course, you should make good use of it – for educational purposes.
With this tool, you can experiment some stuff yourself and let the original developer know about
your idea as well. What do you think you’ll be using it for?
14. sqlmap
If you were looking for an open source penetration testing tool – sqlmap is one of the best. It
automates the process of exploiting SQL injection flaws and helps you take over database
servers.
15. John the Ripper
John the Ripper is a popular password cracker tool available on Kali Linux. It’s free and open
source as well. But, if you are not interested in the community-enhanced version, you can choose
the pro version for commercial use.
16. Snort
 Want real-time traffic analysis and packet logging capability? Snort has got your back. Even
being an open source intrusion prevention system, it has a lot to offer.
The official website mentions the procedure to get it installed if you don’t have it already.
17. Autopsy Forensic Browser
Autopsy is a digital forensic tool to investigate what happened on your computer. Well, you can
also use it to recover images from SD card. It is also being used by law enforcement officials.
You can read the documentation to explore what you can do with it.
You should also check out their GitHub page.
18. King Phisher
Phishing attacks are very common nowadays. And, King Phisher tool helps test, and promote
user awareness by simulating real-world phishing attacks. For obvious reasons, you will need
permission to simulate it on a server content of an organization.
19. Nikto
Nikto is a powerful web server scanner – that makes it one of the best Kali Linux tools available.
It checks in against potentially dangerous files/programs, outdated versions of server, and many
more things.
20. Yersinia
Yersinia is an interesting framework to perform Layer 2 attacks (Layer 2 refers to the data link
layer of OSI model) on a network. Of course, if you want a network to be secure, you will have
to consider all the seven layers. However, this tool focuses on Layer 2 and a variety of network
protocols that include STP, CDP, DTP, and so on.
21. Social Engineering Toolkit (SET)
If you are into pretty serious penetration testing stuff, this should be one of the best tools you
should check out. Social engineering is a big deal and with SET tool, you can help protect
against such attacks.
Wrapping Up
There’s actually a lot of tools that comes bundled with Kali Linux. Do refer to Kali
Linux’ official tool listing page to find them all.

Top 10 Kali Linux Tools For Hacking

 Difficulty Level : Medium
 Last Updated : 06 Sep, 2022

 Read

 Discuss
Kali Linux is a Debian-derived Linux distribution that is maintained by Offensive
Security. It was developed by Mati Aharoni and Devon Kearns. Kali Linux is a specially
designed OS for network analysts, Penetration testers, or in simple words, it is for those
who work under the umbrella of cybersecurity and
analysis. 

 
The official website of Kali Linux is Kali.org. It gained its popularity when it was
practically used in Mr. Robot Series. It was not designed for general purposes, it is
supposed to be used by professionals or by those who know how to operate Linux/Kali.
To know how to install Kali Linux check its official documentation. Sometimes we have
to automate our tasks while performing penetration testing or hacking as there could be
thousands of conditions and payloads to test and testing them manually is a difficult task,
So to increase the time efficiency we use tools that come pre-packed with Kali Linux.
These tools not only saves our time but also captures the accurate data and output the
specific result. Kali Linux comes packed with more than 350 tools which could be useful
for hacking or penetration testing. Here we have the list of important Kali Linux tools
that could save a lot of your time and effort.
1. Nmap
Nmap is an open-source network scanner that is used to recon/scan networks. It is used to
discover hosts, ports, and services along with their versions over a network. It sends
packets to the host and then analyzes the responses in order to produce the desired results.
It could even be used for host discovery, operating system detection, or scanning for open
ports. It is one of the most popular reconnaissance tools. To use nmap:
 Ping the host with ping command to get the IP address
ping hostname
 Open the terminal and enter the following command there:
nmap -sV ipaddress
 Replace the IP address with the IP address of the host you want to scan.
 It will display all the captured details of the
host. 

To know more, you can read more from here .

2. Burp Suite

Burp Suite is one of the most popular web application security testing software. It is used
as a proxy, so all the requests from the browser with the proxy pass through it. And as the
request passes through the burp suite, it allows us to make changes to those requests as
per our need which is good for testing vulnerabilities like XSS or SQLi or even any
vulnerability related to the web. Kali Linux comes with burp suite community edition
which is free but there is a paid edition of this tool known as burp suite professional
which has a lot many functions as compared to burp suite community edition. To use
burpsuite:
 Read this to learn how to setup burp suite.
 Open terminal and type “burpsuite” there.
 Go to the Proxy tab and turn the interceptor switch to on.
 Now visit any URL and it could be seen that the request is
captured. 

3. Wireshark

Wireshark is a network security tool used to analyze or work with data sent over a
network. It is used to analyze the packets transmitted over a network. These packets may
have information like the source IP and the destination IP, the protocol used, the data, and
some headers. The packets generally have an extension of “.pcap” which could be read
using the Wireshark tool. Read thisto learn how to set up and configure Wireshark. To
use wireshark:
 Open Wireshark and download a demo pcap file from here
 Press”ctrl+o” to open a pcap file in wireshark.
 Now it can be seen that it display the list of packets along with the headers of these
packets. 

4. metasploit Framework

Metasploit is an open-source tool that was designed by Rapid7 technologies. It is one of

the world’s most used penetration testing frameworks. It comes packed with a lot of
exploits to exploit the vulnerabilities over a network or operating systems. Metasploit
generally works over a local network but we can use Metasploit for hosts over the
internet using “port forwarding“. Basically Metasploit is a CLI based tool but it even has
a GUI package called “armitage” which makes the use of Metasploit more convenient
and feasible. To use metasploit:
 Metasploit comes pre-installed with Kali Linux
 Just enter “msfconsole” in the
terminal. 

5. aircrack-ng

Aircrack is an all in one packet sniffer, WEP and WPA/WPA2 cracker, analyzing tool
and a hash capturing tool. It is a tool used for wifi hacking. It helps in capturing the
package and reading the hashes out of them and even cracking those hashes by various
attacks like dictionary attacks. It supports almost all the latest wireless interfaces. To use
aircrack-ng:
 aircrack-ng comes pre-compiled with Kali Linux.
 Simply type aircrack-ng in the terminal to use it.
  
6. Netcat Netcat is a networking tool used to work with ports and performing actions like
port scanning, port listening, or port redirection. This command is even used for Network
Debugging or even network daemon testing. This tool is considered as the Swiss army
knife of networking tools. It could even be used to do the operating related to TCP, UDP,
or UNIX-domain sockets or to open remote connections and much more. To use netcat:
 Netcat comes pre-installed with Kali Linux.
 Just type “nc” or “netcat” in the terminal to use the tool.
 To perform port listening type the following commands in 2 different terminals.
nc -l -p 1234
nc 127.0.0.1 1234

Read this for more information regarding netcat tool.

7. John the Ripper

John the Ripper is a great tool for cracking passwords using some famous brute force
attacks like dictionary attack or custom wordlist attack etc. It is even used to crack the
hashes or passwords for the zipped or compressed files and even locked files as well. It
has many available options to crack hashes or passwords. To use John the Ripper:
 John the ripper comes pre-installed in Kali Linux.
 Just type “john” in the terminal to use the tool.
8. sqlmap

sqlmap is one of the best tools to perform SQL injection attacks. It just automates the
process of testing a parameter for SQL injection and even automates the process of
exploitation of the vulnerable parameter. It is a great tool as it detects the database on its
own so we just have to provide a URL to check whether the parameter in the URL is
vulnerable or not, we could even use the requested file to check for POST parameters. To
use sqlmap tool:
 sqlmap comes pre-installed in Kali Linux
 Just type sqlmap in the terminal to use the
tool. 

9. Autopsy

Autopsy is a digital forensics tool that is used to gather information from forensics. Or in
other words, this tool is used to investigate files or logs to learn about what exactly was
done with the system. It could even be used as a recovery software to recover files from a
memory card or a pen drive. To use autopsy tool:
 Autopsy comes pre-installed in Kali Linux
 Just type “autopsy” in the
terminal. 

 Now visit http://localhost:9999/autopsy in order to use the

tool. 
10. Social Engineering Toolkit

Social Engineering Toolkit is a collection of tools that could be used to perform social
engineering attacks. These tools use and manipulate human behavior for information
gathering. it is a great tool to phish the websites even. To use Social Engineering Toolkit
 Social Engineering Toolkit comes pre-installed with Kali Linux
 Just type “setoolkit” in the terminal.
 Agree to the terms and conditions to start using the social engineering toolkit.