The Top 9 Security Testing Tools

Astra Security is a cyber security firm, privately owned and operating from the US and India. Their security testing product, Pentest Platform, identifies over 30,000 vulnerabilities each month. The Pentest Platform includes an innovative vulnerability scanner, based on comprehensive security data and intelligence. The tool conducts scans with over 8,000 tests, ensuring security gaps are identified.

The platform also conducts compliance checks with a security engine, helping businesses to achieve ISO 27001, HIPAA, SOC2, and GDPR compliance. Astra’s vulnerability scanner also scrutinizes pages behind login screens to assure every section of your application is secure, and offers a browser extension for a seamless login, to record login details, and to ensure no vulnerability goes unnoticed.

Astra also scans for Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and Single Page Apps (SPAs) to ensure that security is managed and maintained to the highest degree.

Fortra Cobalt Strike is a security testing tool designed to replicate the tactics and techniques of an advanced adversary within an IT environment. Cobalt Strike is designed to emulate advanced and stealthy threats, typically associated with long-term threat actors targeting a network. Cobalt Strike supports adversary simulations and red team operations through its post-exploitation agents and collaborative capacities.

Highlighted features include the imitation of various malware and social engineering processes to enhance security operations and incident response capabilities. The product also provides Beacon, a post-exploitation payload designed to control target networks while remaining undetectable. This feature assists in advanced adversary simulations. Cobalt Strike supports dynamic engagement for red teams who, using a shared team server, can collaborate on realistic attack scenarios while documenting all post-exploitation activities.

The system itself is built on a flexible framework. It offers capabilities for users to alter built-in scripts, develop their own, and even share extensions through the Community Kit. This component of user-generated cooperation and development is essential to maintaining up-to-date threat simulations

Invicti’s Application Security Testing solution incorporates unique Dynamic and Interactive Application Security Testing (DAST + IAST) methodology, offering higher detection rates of vulnerabilities compared to other solutions that rely on a single testing approach. The solution covers any type of web application, web service, and web API, regardless of the technology or language they’re built with.

Invicti offers enhanced visibility, even into forgotten or hidden applications, to identify potential vulnerabilities.. Their Proof-Based Scanning feature considerably reduces time-consuming false positives, and automated assignment of confirmed vulnerabilities to developers streamlines the rectification process. The solution provides detailed documentation to address vulnerabilities swiftly by identifying their exact locations.

Invicti also promotes continuous security with non-stop scanning and security checks integrated within the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), providing automatic notifications in case any deployed technology becomes outdated, preventing any potential security gaps.

PortSwigger is a recognized worldwide leader in web application security, particularly known for their development of security testing software. The company’s flagship product is the Burp Suite, a security tool for penetration testing of web applications. It is available in both a free and a paid version.

Burp Suite automates monotonous testing tasks, enabling more efficient manual and semi-automated security testing. Burp Suite Professional offers features such as intelligent automation to optimize workflow, scanning capability of JavaScript-enriched applications and APIs, and sophisticated out-of-band application security testing to minimize false positives. Users also benefit from regular updates.

In addition to its robust testing capabilities, Burp Suite proffers features that improve productivity, simplify report generation and facilitate sharing of results. Users can also customize the tool according to their preferences and needs, create custom extensions using the API and access an extensive library of pre-written BApp extensions. Specifically designed to meet the needs of professional testers, Burp Suite Professional offers a unique blend of automated and manual testing tools, allowing users to perform more efficient and reliable security testing.

Probely is a leading provider of cloud-based application security testing solutions. It prioritizes a DevSecOps approach, promoting collaboration between Security and DevOps teams. The platform is capable of detecting more than 30,000 vulnerabilities, including SQLi, XSS, Log4j, OS Command Injection, and SSL/TLS issues, across web applications and RESTful APIs without false positives.

Probely offers an automated, scalable, and highly accurate vulnerability scanner that integrates directly into your software development lifecycle. Probely allows users to customize scanning configurations, schedule scans, perform partial scans, or scans behind the firewall. Authenticated scans are also supported to evaluate applications using Single Sign-On (SSO), OpenID Connect, and more. Probely’s scanner replicates human behavior, clicking through web applications, filling out forms and can interact with rich JavaScript apps.

If you’re dealing with Single-Page Applications (SPAs) that make XMLHttpRequests (XHR) to APIs, Probely can follow and scan these endpoints. Alternatively, standalone APIs can also be scanned by supplying OpenAPI/Swagger schema files or Postman Collections.

Probely values efficiency and effectively scales application security testing, integrating into CI/CD pipelines or scheduling ongoing scans of your applications. Additionally, Probely helps businesses comply with various application security testing requirements related to standards like PCI-DSS, SOC2, HIPAA, ISO27001, GDPR, and more.

Rapid7 supports organizations to resolve vulnerabilities, detect malicious activities, tackle attacks, and automate repetitive tasks. Rapid7’s offerings, Metasploit, is a penetration testing software highly appreciated by offensive security teams.

Through Metasploit, organizations can simulate real-world attacks on their networks, aiding their security teams in identifying and neutralizing genuine threats. Metasploit is leveraged by an expansive security community, with a large database of known exploits used to improve vulnerability scanning.

Metasploit also prioritizes vulnerabilities based on their impact, allowing security to concentrate their efforts on the most critical areas. Following identification and prioritization, Metasploit helps verify real-world impacts and helps teams to rectify vulnerabilities.

In addition to penetration testing, Metasploit supports teams in gathering and filtering attack information, and prioritizing leading attack vectors. Integration with InsightVM offers a comprehensive penetration testing and vulnerability management workflow. With Rapid7’s Metasploit, organizations can not only identify potential vulnerabilities but also implement affirmative measures to enhance their overall security structure.

Tenable is a cybersecurity company based in Columbia, Maryland. Their offering, Nessus, is designed to provide security testing for modern attack surfaces beyond traditional IT assets, including web applications, internet-connected attack surfaces, and cloud infrastructure.

With its platform versatility, Nessus provides portability regardless of the operational environment. Dynamically compiled plug-ins enable enhanced scan performance and efficiency, speeding up the initial scan and time-to-value ratio. Nessus accurately detects vulnerabilities in custom application code and third-party components and can identify and assess internet-connected assets for vulnerabilities, unmasking issues as part of the software development lifecycle before it reaches a critical point.

The platform offers more than 450 pre-configured templates for rapid understanding of vulnerabilities, generates configuration audits for compliance use cases, and can export reports in the formats best suited for your security process.

Nessus also provides a Live Results features, which offers an offline vulnerability assessment with every plug-in update and can run scans to validate the presence of the vulnerability. Issues of similar nature are grouped together for simplified research and prioritization, while the unique ‘snoozing’ feature allows certain issues to be set aside from view for specified periods, enabling focus on the most critical issues.

Wireshark is an open-source packet analyzer that offers several features for network diagnosis, protocol investigation, software development, and learning purposes. It is a widely used tool across commercial and non-profit sectors due to its thorough protocol information detailing and flexibility. The tool is compatible with UNIX and Windows platforms.

This solution offers users the ability to capture live packet data from a network interface and open files with packet data that have been captured through Wireshark, tcpdump/WinDump, and other similar services. It also provides options to import packets from text files containing hex dumps of packet data and enables users to save captured packet data. It can export packets in various file formats. Its filter and search capabilities allow sorting of packets based on different criteria.

Other notable features include display colorization based on filters and statistic generation, and it can capture traffic from various network media types such as Ethernet, Wireless LAN, Bluetooth, USB, and more, depending upon the user’s hardware and operating system.

As a tool maintained under the GNU General Public License (GPL), Wireshark allows free usage on any number of computers with no license keys or fees. The source code, also distributed freely under GPL, can be modified by users to add new protocols either as plugins or integrated into the source code.

Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP), (formerly known as as OWASP ZAP), is an open-source security solution meant to be utilized to safeguard web applications. It is designed for users with varying skill levels, from application security beginners to seasoned penetration testers. Notably, ZAP’s functionality extends to serve as a proxy server, facilitating the manipulation of all traffic that it intercepts, inclusive of HTTPS traffic.

ZAP’s features include an active scan and passive scan, add-ons, alerts, anti CSRF tokens, APIs, various authentication methods and verification strategies. It also facilitates convenient manipulator-in-the-middle proxy services, data-driven content, the capacity for managing HTTP sessions, and a marketplace for distributing extensions.

ZAP offers multiple scanning rules, both active and passive. ZAP’s Scan Policies define which rules operate and their process of execution, and users have the ability to create multiple scan policies to suit different scenarios.