Top 5 Publicly Accessible Hacking Tools You Can Download Today

In the field of hacking, experience is the key trait. There is currently no school that offers a Bachelor of Commercial Science Major in Hacking or similar course. Just like any other art, time equals more expertise. The longer a person practices, the better he/she is in hacking. They are self-made individuals driven by the thirst for knowledge, powered by the tools not exclusive for them only but rather free tools.

These free tools can be downloaded by anyone, but one similar trait in common hackers have is perseverance. Below we enumerate a short list of available hacking tools, usable for both ethical hacking and penetration testing:

HUC Packet Transmitter
Also known as HTran, a TCP redirector, and interceptor, it helps hide the attacker’s origin in the communication session. When used as an ethical hacking tool, it can be used to bypass intrusion prevention systems which is very useful in a formal penetration testing session. Security controls in the organization using Windows Active Directory or its SAMBA equivalent can be bypassed by HTran.

Powershell Empire
Should not be misinterpreted as a Microsoft-issued tool, it is not. Empire is a collection of testing scripts currently being developed since 2015. It uses the Windows PowerShell API’s to communicate with the Windows computer or server remotely and issuing user-specific commands. Creation of malformed files to fool a legitimate user can be produced using the Empire scripts.

China Chopper
It is not confirmed if this tool originated from China, but this is a collection of exploits used by cybercriminals in the wild to attack unpatched systems. In ethical hacking, its use can be redone in order to reveal to the pen testing team what areas of their client’s system have a vulnerability which needs patching ASAP. A very observant network administrator can detect an abnormal number of HTTP POST request everytime China Chopper is used, hence as of this time using it for blackhat hacking is not covert.

Mimikatz
Is a specialized tool to analyze active computer memory. The reality of its effectiveness is many of the user credentials are encrypted on the disk but actually decrypted when in memory. By design, computers don’t encrypt the active memory, as it is where quickly needed data and instruction are temporarily stored there to be executed by the processor at the soonest possible time. With Mimikatz, the content of the memory is revealed to the user, taking a queue about the user credentials stored there.

JBiFrost
Remote access trojans are dime-a-dozen in the cybersecurity space. However, what separates JBiFrost from the rest is its Adwind family ties, a family of RAT that grabs root access from the infected computer. This RAT gets superuser/administrator privilege without the user knowing that it is happening, that it is running. This enables JBiFrost to hide from the process tab of the Windows Task Manager. When used as a monitoring tool for a corporate environment, it effectively deploys a keylogger without slowing down the infected computer. This RAT is capable of bypassing the monitoring capabilities of Wireshark, hence its network packet cannot be seen from a Wireshark window.