Top Pentest Tools in India – All You Need to Know

There has been a 125% increase in the global incident volume of cyberattacks year by year till 2021. Cybersecurity issues impact every industry. No solution is permanent and the security you get by buying a firewall or placing a vulnerability scanner is not sufficient.

With the current cyber threat landscape in vision, you have to treat cyber security as more than an IT issue and imbibe it in your business culture. It is easier said than done, given the number of applications, plugins, devices, and people involved in every little business functionality and technology implementation. 95% of the security breaches can be attributed to some human error. You need to be prepared, and it is hard to be prepared without Penetration Testing. That is why we bring you the top pentest tools in India.

What is Penetration Testing?

Penetration Testing is an offensive security exercise where security engineers simulate a controlled hack of your systems, find vulnerabilities, exploit them, and tell you how to fix them. You learn how much damage a vulnerability can cost, you land in a position to rightly judge which ones to treat first, and you get assistance in fixing them.            

How is a Penetration Test different from a Vulnerability Assessment? 

The two phrases Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing are often uttered in the same breath as if they are the same thing. It is not true. Vulnerability Assessment is performed as a part of Penetration Testing, but it is also an independent exercise. 

In vulnerability assessment, an automated scanner is deployed to find and rank security loopholes in your website, application, or network. Penetration Testing takes this one step further and exploits certain vulnerabilities to gain deeper insights into them.

Read also: Penetration Testing – What, Why & How [A Complete Guide]

Why do you need Penetration Testing?

1. To get a comprehensive understanding of the security posture.
2. Gain tangible insight into the risk posed by each vulnerability.
3. Get thorough and efficient guidance to remediation of the issues.
4. Connect vulnerability remediation with business outcomes.
5. Test your current security measures against a potent threat.
6. Comply with relevant security standards.

These are just a few of the reasons why you should engage in Penetration Testing. A pentest is a goal-oriented exercise, hence your objectives set its course as well as its scope and its success will depend upon the tools and the people involved. Choosing from among the top penetration testing services india can prove crucial to the endeavor. 

Why Astra is the best in pentesting?

• We’re the only company that combines automated & manual pentest to create a one-of-a-kind pentest platform
• Vetted scans ensure zero false positives
• Our intelligent vulnerability scanner emulates hacker behavior & evolves with every pentest
• Astra’s scanner helps you shift left by integrating with your CI/CD
• Our platform helps you uncover, manage & fix vulnerabilities in one place
• Trusted by the brands you trust like Agora, Spicejet, Muthoot, Dream11, etc.

Let’s talk

Get started

What does a Pentester’s toolkit look like?

The process of Pentesting is generally divided into five steps. The Pentest starts with planning, followed by scan, infiltration, escalation, and analysis. Each of these steps requires certain kinds of tools. We will look into different types of tools a Pentester needs to be equipped with.

Read also: Breaking Down the Pentest Process – A 5 Step Guide

1. Port Scanners

Ports are virtual points where network connections start or end. Each port is associated with a different process. These help operating systems distinguish between traffic from different sources. Port scanners are used to identify open ports in a network. You can use a port scanner to send a packet to specific ports to uncover security vulnerabilities.

2. Vulnerability Scanners

A vulnerability scanner is an automated tool that you use to create an inventory of all IT assets and then test them for known vulnerabilities. A security professional can use the report generated by a vulnerability scanner to identify security loopholes and categorize them by severity.

Also Read: Why Firewall Penetration Testing is Essential to Your Security Strategy

3. Network Sniffers

Network sniffers can monitor network traffic and information. It can be used by blackhats to ‘sniff’ traffic to steal passwords or other information. Network administrators can use it to find vulnerabilities and ensure a secure environment.

4. Intercept Proxy

An intercept proxy sits between the client-side browser and the internet. It allows you to monitor and alter responses and requests by intercepting the connection. It is a very important tool for web-application vulnerability assessment.

5. Password Cracker

Just as the name suggests, a password cracker is used to crack passwords. There are several different password cracking techniques like brute force, dictionary attacks, combined dictionary attacks, rainbow table attack, etc. These techniques are used by both attackers and pentesters.

By now you have formed a general idea about the different kinds of tools generally used by Penetration Testers. Now let us learn about the top Pentest Tools in India. These are all loaded with capabilities to help you with vulnerability assessment and penetration testing. 

Read also: 16 Pentest Tools To Help You Find Security Vulnerabilities in a Website 

Astra Pentest

Astra Pentest has a couple of clearly visible advantages over most of its competitors. For instance, they have created a Pentest suite that makes it as easy for a user to monitor and respond to a vulnerability assessment and penetration test as shopping online. You get a dedicated dashboard, the vulnerabilities start appearing on that with CVSS scores, and recommendations, real quick. You can use the same dashboard to inform security engineers about an issue. They extensively help your developers fix the vulnerabilities. It is just neat.

Here’s what puts Astra on top of the list of the top Pentest Tools in India

• Comprehensive Penetration Testing with video POCs and in-call remediation guidance.   
• 8000+ tests to uncover all vulnerabilities along with free re-scans.
• Interactive dashboard to visualize the vulnerability analysis.
• Round the clock chat support.
• Login recorder to make scanner authentication simpler for users.
• Globally acknowledged certification.

Some of these features might overlap with offerings from other Pentest tools, that is where Astra’s relationship management, support, and good will come into play. They have secured companies like Ford, Gillette, and GoDaddy. You cannot miss them while looking for the top Pentest tools in India.

NMAP

NMAP is short for Network Mapper. It is an open-source tool that helps you map a network by scanning ports, discovering operating systems, and creating an inventory of devices and the services running on them. 

It sends differently structured packets for different transport layer protocols which return with IP addresses and other information. You can use this information for 

• Host discovery
• OS fingerprinting 
• service discovery 
• security auditing. 

You can use the tool for a large network with thousands of devices and ports.

So, how does NMAP actually help in security audits?

Well, when security auditors use NMAP to create an inventory of devices and to discover operating systems and applications running on a host network, they can also scan and find out their vulnerabilities to specific security threats. 

For instance, if a certain version of an application is declared vulnerable, the network administrator can scan the network to find whether it’s running that version of the application and patch it up if needed.

WireShark

WireShark is another famous open-source tool that you can use for protocol analysis. It allows you to monitor network activities at a microscopic level. It is a growing platform with thousands of developers contributing from across the world.

With WireShark you can perform:

• Live capture and offline analysis
• Inspection of hundreds of different protocols
• Browse captured data via GUI
• Decrypt protocols
• Read live data from Ethernet, and a number of other mediums
• Export output to XML, PostScript, CSV, or plain text

And more.

WireShark is the industry standard for protocol analysis in many different sectors. If you know what you are doing, it is a great tool to use.

Metasploit

Metasploit is a Ruby-based open-source framework, used by both ethical hackers and malicious actors to probe systematic vulnerabilities on networks and servers. The Metasploit framework also contains portions of fuzzing, anti-forensic, and evasion tools.

It is easy to install and can work on a wide range of platforms regardless of the languages they run on. The popularity and the wide availability of Metasploit among professional hackers make it an important tool for Penetration Testers as well. 

Metasploit currently includes nearly 1677 exploits along with almost 500 payloads that include:

• Command shell payloads
• Dynamic payloads
• Meterpreter payloads
• Static payloads

The framework also includes listeners, encoders, post-exploitation code, and whatnot.

In the right pair of hands, Metasploit can be a really powerful tool for Pentesting.

Burp Suite

Burp Suite is a set of penetration testing tools by Portswigger Web Security. It is used by ethical hackers, pentesters, and security engineers. It is like a one-stop shop for bug bounty hunters and security researchers. Let us take a look at a few tools included in Burp Suite.

• Spider: It is a web crawler. You can use it to map the target application. It lets you create an inventory of all the endpoints, monitor their functionalities, and look for vulnerabilities.
• Proxy: As explained earlier, a proxy sits between the browser and the internet to monitor, and modify the requests and responses in transit.
• Intruder: It runs a set of values through an input point and lets you analyze the output for success, failure and content length.

These aside the suite includes Repeater, Sequencer, Decoder, Extender, and some other add-on tools.

Burp Suite has both a free community edition and a commercial edition.

Nessus

Nessus is a vulnerability scanner by Tenable. It has been used by security professionals for vulnerability assessment since 1998. Their aim is to make vulnerability assessments simple and remediations quick. You can deploy it on a variety of platforms. 

Here are some key features

• It helps you test for 65k common vulnerabilities and exposures.
• Helps you perform fast vulnerability triage.
• Continuously adds new plugins to protect from new threats.
• Integrates easily to the rest of the Tenable product portfolio. 

Now that you have had exposure to the top Pentest Tools in India, let us circle back to the top of our list.

Also Read- Best Tenable Alternative

The Convenience of Astra Pentest

Penetration Testing is a legal necessity in some sectors and a logical necessity in others. As a procedure, it can be quite complex given the high stakes. The success of Astra Pentest lies in its simplicity and speed.

With Astra Pentest, you get a complete security audit in 10 days which is way quicker than most of their competitors.  

The security researchers and engineers at Astra Security keep digging up new ways to make Pentest easier for the users. Take the latest login recorder extension, for example, it makes authentication for scan behind login pages completely hassle-free for users.

The best part is, they take care of the entire Pentest process. Even when it comes to remediation, Astra’s security engineers make it super easy for your developers to reproduce and fix the vulnerabilities.

To Conclude

Successful deployment of security measures is a game of speed. The faster you take the right action, the fewer time attackers have to exploit vulnerabilities existing in your systems or in your network. Now that you have finished browsing through a list of top Pentest tools in India, it is time you took some action. Get ready to find those vulnerabilities before the hackers do.  

FAQs

Share this...

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Linkedin