Six Top Offensive Security Tools

For cybersecurity efforts to be effective, it is important to be both proactive and reactive to different types of vulnerabilities, breaches, or attacks. Testing your environment with the right offensive security tools is critical to protect your organization from threats, maintain a strong security posture and mitigate risk.

Offensive security is all about testing, verifying, and validating security postures from an adversary’s perspective, which includes penetration testing. Pentesting helps IT and cybersecurity teams learn how to deal with possible breaches before they occur and assess whether the organization’s security policies, procedures, and controls are effective. To accomplish this, organizations should utilize the top offensive security tools and technologies in the industry.

1. TenableNessus 

Nessus is one of the world’s most popular vulnerability scanners that helps identify vulnerabilities and gaps in your environment. Vulnerabilities increase the risk of falling victim to data breaches, ransomware, and other malicious attacks. The ever-expanding network edge of an organization and a constantly changing IT landscape makes it difficult to keep pace with attackers and new vulnerabilities, but Nessus provides the visibility, accuracy, and speed necessary to stay ahead of those risks.

Nessus offers coverage for over 47,000 unique IT assets with out-of-the-box compliance and configuration templates, allowing you to audit against CIS benchmarks. It also allows you to group similar problems into one thread to help prioritize the most critical issues.

2. BurpSuite

Burp Suite is the leading toolkit for web application security testing. It enables automated web vulnerability scanning that removes bottlenecks and saves application security teams time with scheduled scans, CI/CD integration, and reporting. Burp Suite is recognized for helping find more vulnerabilities quickly compared to other web application scanners. Instead of software security being a testing process that slows you down, web security through Burp Suite simplifies the way you work and increases agility.

3. CobaltStrike 

This threat emulation software provides Adversary Simulations and Red Team Operations, which are security assessments that imitate the tactics of an advanced adversary within a network. Cobalt Strike provides a post-exploitation agent and covert channels to mimic a long-term embedded actor and allows you to change network indicators to look like different malware every time.

Additionally, Cobalt Strike’s system profiler maps out a target’s attack surface and provides a list of apps and plugins it discovers along with Internal IP address of users behind a proxy server. This makes it easier to identify a successful attack path.

4. Acunetix

Acunetix is a complete enterprise-grade web application vulnerability scanner that detects OWASP Top 10, SQL injections, XSS, misconfigurations, exposed databases, out-of-band vulnerabilities, and more. It allows you to run incredibly fasts scans that identify vulnerabilities instantly. You can schedule one-time or recurring scans, scan multiple environments at the same time, and automatically prioritize high-risk vulnerabilities as you scan.

Acunetix helps organizations reclaim time by eliminating false positives, pinpointing vulnerability locations, and providing remediation guidance to help developers resolve security flaws easily. Acunetix can scan any framework, language, or technology which ensures no part of your applications are left vulnerable.

5. KaliLinux

Kali Linux is a penetration testing platform designed for digital forensics, penetration testing, and security auditing. It contains over 600 penetration testing tools, is completely free to install, and is customizable with the use of meta packages optimized for specific need sets of a security professional.

6. ScoutSuite 

Scout Suite is an open-source, multi-cloud security auditing tool, which enables security posture assessment of cloud environments. It gathers configuration data for manual inspection and highlights risk areas, presenting a clear view of the attack surface automatically. The tool provides a point-in-time view of the cloud account it was run in, and supports AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The Evolve Security reporting difference

At Evolve Security, we use all these top tier technologies to deliver a superior comprehensive penetration test management solution alongside our Darwin Attack® pentest platform. Instead of waiting on one-way static reports, we provide real-time updates of threats to your environment and remediation insights.

Through our Darwin Attack platform, you get a single view of all your assets, vulnerabilities, risks, findings, and reports across your entire environment. This allows you to:

·      View threat and vulnerability findings in realtime, drilling down into individual details.

·      Access a variety of reporting functions to meet internal, audit, compliance, and other needs.

·      Reduce recovery time and up-skill your team through an interactive in-platform feed.

This comprehensive, holistic view of your vulnerabilities helps you tackle each one based on risk or status, stay organized, and reduce your recovery time. On top of that, our team of experts supports you with hands-on, real-time remediation planning so you know exactly how to remediate identified issues as fast as possible.

Working with a third-party partner rather than pentesting internally has a wide range of benefits, such as minimizing reporting issues, providing an outsider’s perspective, and offering access to stronger tools with more experience. Learn more about how we can work with you to manage your organization’s vulnerabilities and level up your offensive security for full protection of your environment.

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