Global companies are considering cybersecurity as one of their top priorities. Increased dependence on technology to drive critical business operations has led to the proliferation of cybercrimes. Mass cyberattacks result in massive financial and reputational losses for the companies and their employees. Besides, cyber-attacks lead to expensive litigations where regulations such as GDPR may impose hefty fines amounting to millions of dollars. In 2021, the advent of open-source tools for cybersecurity have helped businesses to keep costs down and deliver faster results. Enhancement to security operations and intelligence has been a major area of focus so far until 2021, with advancements around everything from behavioural analytics and managed account takeover monitoring to using threat intelligence. In this article, we have listed the 10 best cybersecurity open-source tools in 2022.
Kali Linux is one of the most common cybersecurity tools. It is an operating system containing at least 300 different tools for security auditing. Kali Linux provides various tools that organizations use to scan their networks and IT systems for vulnerabilities. The main benefit of Kali Linux is that it can be used by users with different levels of cybersecurity knowledge.
In many ways, security starts with understanding the situation. For a couple of generations of IT professionals, understanding their network's vulnerabilities starts with Nessus from Tenable. It comes in both free and commercial versions. Its current version is a commercial program, though it is free for personal home use. Tenable has maintained Version 2, though, in the best tradition of open-source software, it has forked and grown in several directions. Nessus is a valuable career skill for cybersecurity professionals.
Metasploit consists of an excellent collection of different tools for carrying out penetration testing exercises. IT experts and cybersecurity professionals use Metasploit to accomplish varying security objectives. These include identifying vulnerabilities in the network or system, formulating strategies for strengthening cybersecurity defence and managing the completed security evaluations.
Central OSS works by installing an intelligent agent that equips the application with smart sensors to analyze codes in real-time from within the application. This allows the software to automatically discover open-source dependencies and provide critical versioning and usable information. Alerts are triggered when risks and policy violations are detected anywhere across the SDLC.
Wireshark can capture network traffic and analyse that traffic in-depth to try and understand it. It can also analyse network traffic that is captured from other tools. Wireshark has in-built knowledge of hundreds of network and application protocols. This tool can be used by novices who are interested to learn the basics of network communications, to experts who need the rapid identification of unknown protocols.
KeePass is a free open-source password manager that securely stores passwords. This security tool enables users to have a single platform to store their unique passwords for websites, email accounts, web servers, and network login credentials. KeePass works by storing passwords in a secure database, which will only unlock by entering a single master key. It encrypts the complete database, which means user names, notes, and much more.
OpenVAS is a vulnerability scanner that includes over 50,000 vulnerability checks and enables its users to create their custom checks. The most noteworthy aspect about OpenVAS is that it can look for vulnerabilities not just in the standard IT software and services, but in lower-level operational technology, like industrial control systems.
ZAP is a web application vulnerability scanner. It acts as a MitM proxy between the users' web browser and a web application. Its systems give full visibility into the web application's communication so that it can analyse those communications for potential vulnerabilities.
VeraCrypt is a security tool for disk encryption. It runs on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux to create a virtual encrypted disk within a file before mounting it as a real disk. This tool encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as a USB flash drive or hard drive before dumping it in the cloud or elsewhere.
It allows the users to protect custom code with static analysis (SAST), secure open-source libraries, and employ hardcoded secret detection and OSS license violation checks. The platform claims to be built with usability and rapid time-to-value in mind.
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