Top 10 Free Network Tools
Looking for some great, free network tools? Need to do some, oh, I don't know, packet sniffing, network scanning, pinging, tracing, resolving, cracking, mapping, exploiting, or penetrating? Or maybe you just want to have some fun? Here are the best free network tools for the job.
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Wireshark is an incredible open source packet analyzer application. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education allowing you to examine data from a live network or from a capture file on disk. Wireshark is cross-platform with versions for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, BSD, and others platforms and supports hundreds of protocols and media types.
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PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. It allows you to connecting securely to a server and run commands.
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Angry IP Scanner probes computers on your network for open ports, and displays all kinds of interesting information about them.
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If you have a home computer's IP address that constantly changes, DynDNS is a must. It will let you get a free subdomain that will always resolve to your home IP address.
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Netcat is a free network tool for reading from and writing network connections using TCP or UDP. It is a feature-rich network debugging and investigation tool, since it can produce almost any kind of correlation you would need and has a number of built-in capabilities. This simple utility reads and writes data across TCP or UDP network connections.
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While its primary use is as a password cracking/recovery tool, Cain and Abel offers many networking capabilities including WEP cracking, speeding up packet capture speed by wireless packet injection, recording of VoIP conversations, and sniffing network passwords.
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Nmap is a multiplatform, free network tool that can scan a network and discover computers and services on a computer network, thus creating a "map" of the network. Just like many simple port scanners, Nmap is capable of discovering passive services on a network despite the fact that such services aren't advertising themselves with a service discovery protocol. In addition Nmap may be able to determine various details about the remote computers. These include operating system, device type, uptime, software product used to run a service, exact version number of that product, presence of some firewall techniques and, on a local area network, even vendor of the remote network card.
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The Metasploit Framework is a development platform for creating security tools and exploits. The framework is used by network security professionals to perform penetration tests, system administrators to verify patch installations, product vendors to perform regression testing, and security researchers world-wide.
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Hamachi is a free VPN tool that bypasses firewalls to make virtual secure network among computers that are not physically on the same network. This means you can access your computer and files from anywhere, regardless of whether you have ugly firewalls enabled.
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YouGetSignal.com is a collection of free network tools that you can use online that you can use to detect open ports, find the location of an IP address, and visually trace the route that packets take to reach a destination.
More Free Network Tools
Vulnerability Scanners
- SAINT Security Administrator's Integrated Network Tool
- ShieldsUP!
- MBSA Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer
- X-scan
- OpenVAS
- Sara Security Auditor's Research Assistant
- SoftPerfect Network Scanner
Packet Sniffers
Other Free Network Tools