Network Security Tools

Contents of This Book

This book is divided into two parts. Part I covers several commonly used open source security tools and shows you how to leverage existing well-known and reliable network security tools to solve your network security problems. Here’s a summary of what we cover:

Chapter 1, Writing Plug-ins for Nessus

Nessus is the most popular vulnerability scanner available today. It is also open source and free. This chapter demonstrates not only how to use Nessus, but also how to write plug-ins to enable it to scan for new vulnerabilities.

Chapter 2, Developing Dissectors and Plug-ins for the Ettercap Network Sniffer

Ettercap is a popular network sniffer that also is free and open source. Its plug-in functionality is one of the most robust available. In fact, quite a few plug-ins for this sniffer are available that perform a variety of useful tasks, such as detecting other sniffers on the network and collecting data such as passwords that are being passed around the network. This chapter explains how to write plug-ins for this most powerful scanner to look for specific data on the network, as well as other useful tricks.

Chapter 3, Extending Hydra and Nmap

Many security tools do not use a plug-in architecture, and therefore cannot be trivially extended. This chapter discusses how to extend the commonly used nonplug-in tool, Hydra, a tool for performing brute force testing against passwords, to support an additional protocol. It also discusses how to create binary signatures ...