Top 10 Best Vulnerability Scanner For Penetration Testing – 2019
A vulnerability scanner is one of the essential tools in IT departments Since vulnerabilities pop up every day and thus leaving a loophole for the organization. Hackers are actively looking for these loopholes to use them for their advantage. Vulnerabilities inside a network need to be identified and fixed immediately to leave your attackers at bay.
Vulnerability scanners are one right way to do this, with their continuous and automated scanning procedures they can scan the network for potential loopholes, say it be on your internet or any device, they would help the IT departments identify the vulnerability and fix it both manually and automatically.
Vulnerability scanner do have two different approaches for performing their routines, authenticated and unauthenticated scans. In the latter case, a penetration tester will show the scan disguised as a hacker without him having the trusted access to the corporate network, this type of scan will help organizations identify the loopholes which will allow hackers to penetrate the system without trusted permissions.
While in the former case, the same tester logs as a user and scans the network, thus showcasing the vulnerabilities that are available for a hacker who is now disguised as a trusted user.
The best vulnerability scanner in the market should allow you to perform both authenticated and unauthenticated type of scans to nullify network vulnerabilities. In this article, we’ll take a look at the top 10 best vulnerability scanners available in the market.
10 Best Vulnerability Scanner
1.OpenVAS
OpenVAS vulnerability scanner will allow IT departments to scan the servers and network devices, thanks to its comprehensive nature. These scanners will look for an IP address and check for any open service by scanning through the ports, misconfiguration, and vulnerabilities in the existing facilities. Once the scan is complete, an automated report is generated and sent as an e-mail for further study and rectification.
OpenVAS can also be operated from an external server, giving you the hacker’s perspective, thus identifying the exposed ports or services and dealing with them in time. If you are already having an in-house incident response or detection system, then OpenVAS will help you improvise your network monitoring and alerts as a whole.
2.Tripwire IP360
Tripwire IP360 is one of the leading vulnerability management solutions in the market, allowing users to identify everything on their network, including on-premises, cloud, and container assets. Tripwire will allow IT departments to access their assets using an agent and agent fewer scans. It also works in integration with vulnerability management and risk management, allowing IT administrators and security professionals to have a holistic approach towards security management.
3.Nessus Professional
Nessus Professional from Tenable is a work for security professionals, taking care of patching, software issues, malware and misconfigurations over a wide range of operating systems and applications.
Nessus brings in a proactive security procedure by identifying the vulnerabilities in time before hackers use them for penetrating a network, also takes care of remote code execution flaws. It cares of most of the network devices, including virtual, physical, and cloud infrastructure.
Tenable has also been mentioned as the Gartner Peer Insights Choice for vulnerability assessment by March 2019.
4.Comodo HackerProof
Comodo HackerProof is another leading vulnerability scanner with robust features that would allow IT departments to scan their vulnerabilities on a daily basis, PCI scanning options, Prevention for drive-by attacks and site inspector technology that helps in next generation website scanning.
Apart from these perks, Comodo also provides an indicator for the users to feel secure while they interact with you, this will reduce the shopping cart abandonment, improve conversions, and generate revenue in large ratio. Not to forget their unique site inspector technology that acts as the best counter for drive-by attacks.
5.Nexpose community
Nexpose community is a vulnerability scanner developed by Rapid7, it is an open source solution that covers most of your network checks. The versatility of this solution is an advantage for IT admins, it can be incorporated into a metaspoit framework, capable of detecting and scanning devices the moment any new device access the network, monitors the vulnerability exposures to the real-world, and above all, it identifies the threat’s capabilities to develop fixes accordingly.
Moreover, also vulnerability scanner s a risk score for the threats, ranging it anywhere between 1-1000, thus giving an idea for security pros to fix the right vulnerability before it is exploited. Nexpose currently offers a one-year free trial.
6.Vulnerability Manager Plus
Vulnerability Manager Plus is a new solution to this market, developed by ManageEngine. With its recent launch into the market and the feature it covers, this could be the expected security tool for organizations. It provides attacker based analytics allowing network admins to check the existing vulnerabilities from a hacker’s perspective.
Apart from that, automatic scans, impact assessment, software risk assessment, security misconfigurations, patching, zero-day vulnerability mitigations scanner and web-server hardening are other highlights of Vulnerability Manager Plus. Comes completely free for 25 devices.
7.Nikto
Nikto is another open source vulnerability scanner like Nexpose community. Nikto helps in understanding the server functions, checking up on their versions, perform a test on the web servers to identify threats and malware presence and to scan different protocols like https, httpd, HTTP and more. Also helps in scanning multiple ports of a server in a short time. Nikto is preferred for its efficiency and server hardening capabilities.
If you aren’t looking for a robust solution to take care of the entire vulnerability management for your enterprise, then Nikto should be your pick.
8.Wireshark
Wireshark is considered to be one of the powerful network protocol analyzers in the market. It is used by many government agencies, businesses, healthcare, and other industries to analyze their network very keenly. Once Wireshark identifies the threat, it takes things offline to examine them. Wireshark runs successfully on Linux, macOS, and Windows devices.
Other highlights of Wireshark includes standard three-pane packet browser, network data can be surfed using a GUI, powerful display filters, VoIP analysis, decryption support for protocols like Kerberos, WEP, SSL/TLS and more.
9.Aircrack-ng
Aircrack-ng will help IT departments to take care of WiFi network security. It is used in network audits, and offers WiFi security and control, helps with drivers and cards, replaying attacks and takes care of the lost keys by capturing the data packets. Supporting OS includes NetBSD, Windows, OS X, Linux, and Solaris.
10.Retina network security scanner
Retina vulnerability scanner is a web-based open source software that takes care of vulnerability management from a centra location. Its features include patching, compliance, configuration, and reporting. Takes care of databases, workstations, servers analyze and web applications, with complete support for VCenter integrations and app scanning virtual environments.
It takes care of multiple platforms offering a complete cross-platform vulnerability assessment and security. Please give a try on this vulnerability scanner and let us know which worked the best for you. If you already have tried them, share your thoughts about them in the comments section.
This post Top 10 Best Vulnerability Scanner For Penetration Testing – 2019 originally appeared on GB Hackers.
