âA good tool does not affect the work of chopping wood.â A good tool greatly aids in enhancing work efficiency, and security engineers likewise require excellent security software to boost their productivity. In specific work scenarios, there will be different choices. Here are 10 open-source and free security tools recommended for you, which can not only enhance work efficiency but also reduce enterprise costs.
Nmap
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Nmap (Network Mapper) is a free, open-source security scanner mainly used for port scanning, network exploration, and vulnerability assessment. Nmap is also popular among systems and network administrators for tasks such as monitoring host uptime, managing service upgrade schedules, and network inventory, among others. Nmap typically uses raw IP packets to probe available hosts on a network and can gather information about the version and service of the target systems.
As a professional and powerful security scanning tool, enterprises need to possess more technical knowledge to fully utilize it. This tool is designed for larger networks and can run on all major operating systems.
Download link: https://nmap.org/
Security Onion
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Security Onion, based on Ubuntu, includes tools necessary for intrusion detection, network security monitoring, and log management, such as Snort, Suricata, Bro, OSSEC, Sguil, Squert, ELSA, Xplico, NetworkMiner, and more.
Security Onion is one of the best tools for network monitoring/forensics and IDS activities, and it also helps enhance your network security awareness. Of course, like other tools, Security Onion requires users to have a substantial amount of technical knowledge to extract more valuable information.
Download link: https://sourceforge.net/projects/security-onion/
Suricata
Suricata is a free, open-source network threat detection tool. It is primarily used for real-time intrusion detection (IDS), embedded intrusion prevention (IPS), and network security monitoring (NSM), among others. Suricata is maintained and owned by the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF).
As a free, open-source security tool, it is surprising that Suricata is favored by many enterprise users. These enterprises even describe Suricata as a mature, fully-featured, practical security tool. Moreover, it has been noted that Suricataâs version updates have been speeding up, and its functionalities are becoming increasingly comprehensive.
Download link: https://suricata-ids.org/download/
Bro
Bro is an open-source, Unix-based monitoring framework primarily used for monitoring network activity, such as software, file types, and networked devices. This tool is part of a research project by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and aims to go beyond traditional signature-based detection. You can use it to monitor all traffic, analyze historical data after a zero-day attack, or build black-hole routers to prevent attacks, among other applications.
Like Suricata, Bro is also a network-based tool but differs slightly in the way it parses information. Bro is aimed at traffic behavior, while Suricata automatically examines packets, as Farral explains. Bro has a wide range of applications and is enough to be used in most relevant environments.
Download link: https://www.bro.org/
pfSense
pfSense is an open-source software based on FreeBSD, with firewall and routing capabilities, and can be configured via a web page. pfSense only provides software components for firewalls, so if you choose to use a firewall, you must customize the hardware as needed.
Download link: https://www.pfsense.org/
Moloch
Moloch is an open-source tool capable of large-scale IPv4 packet capture (PCAP), indexing, and database management. It is designed to enhance existing security infrastructure by storing and indexing network traffic. Moloch is not intended to replace IDS engines but to adhere to their PCAP format standards for storing and indexing all network traffic, providing quick access. Moloch can be deployed on multiple systems and can scale to handle traffic of several gigabits per second.
Download link: http://molo.ch/#downloads
OSSIM
OSSIM (Open Source Security Information Management System) is a very popular and complete open-source security architecture. By integrating open-source products, OSSIM provides a foundational platform for realizing security monitoring functionality. It aims to offer a centralized, organized framework capable of better monitoring and display.
OSSIMâs bundled features include asset discovery, intrusion detection, vulnerability assessment, SIEM, and behavior monitoring. AlienVaultâs âOpen Threat Exchangeâ allows users to send and receive information about malicious hosts, and ongoing development aims to offer broader security control permissions.
Download link: https://www.alienvault.com/products/ossim
Cuckoo Sandbox
Cuckoo is an open-source sandbox software used for the automated analysis of malware. By setting up an isolated environment to execute malware, it monitors the behavior of the malware. You can provide any file for execution, and it will generate a behavior log within a short period. Cuckoo can analyze different types of malicious files and websites in Windows, OS X, Lunix, and Android virtualization environments.
Download link: https://cuckoosandbox.org/
Apache Spot
Apache Spot is an open-source project initiated by Intel and developed by the community. Its goal is to provide advanced threat detection through big data analysis and machine learning, thereby improving the visibility of security threats.
By implementing large-scale log management and data storage using Apache Hadoop, and utilizing Apache Spark for machine learning and near-real-time anomaly detection, various institutions and network security application developers have opened unprecedented data analysis capabilities. Using Apache Spot, various organizations can more effectively leverage the technologies and data science capabilities offered by the Apache big data ecosystem to detect unknown network threats.
Download link: http://spot.apache.org/
Metasploit
Metasploit is a penetration testing framework created by the renowned security researcher HD Moore. It is designed to help security and IT professionals identify security issues, verify vulnerability mitigations, and manage expert-driven security assessments, providing genuine security risk intelligence. Metasploit is currently maintained by the open-source community and Rapid7. The goal of Metasploit is to always support open-source software, promote community participation, and provide the worldâs most innovative penetration testers with resources and tools.
Download link: https://www.metasploit.com/