In our present situation, we are hearing a lot of news about cyber-attacks and cyber-crimes. Our world is changing and almost all the transactions and our daily life depend on cyber space. It is very essential to protect the cyber space and IT environment for every organization and individual.
There are a huge number of threats are in cyber space that every organization must know to understand how much risk is associated with every step in this cyber world.
Viruses, Hackers, malware, Trojans, Worms, Scareware, Ransomwares, and a huge number of threats are there in cyber space so organizations irrespective of their size must know the methods and essential tools to protect themselves from such cyber-attacks.
Every organization now has a special team that can handle cyber-attacks and cyber criminals. In the present time, there are different tools that every organization should use to make itself protected.
Let us discuss the important General categories of cyber security tools
Firewalls are the basic and effective security measure, which acts as a wall of defense between the organization's internal network and the outside network. Firewalls filter each packet of data that is moving in and out of the organization's network and filter the malicious packets.
Firewalls can be implemented as software or as hardware depending on the need and importance of the data to be secured. Every packet of data has to pass through a firewall and be filtered. Nothing in the cyber world can assure 100 percent protection as the hackers can able to make data packets that act as genuine but malicious inside and it can overcome the firewall filtering. An overall firewall is the best defense that can be useful to protect from cyber criminals and cyber-attacks.
This is the second most effective security system that every system needs to protect itself from attacks. An antivirus is a program that is developed for detecting and filtering all types of malicious programs that are running in a system without our knowledge.
Antivirus programs are effective in protecting our systems and network devices from many threats caused by viruses, Worms, Trojans, Spywares, Botnets, Adware, Ransomware, Keylogger, and many more.
Antivirus must be installed and it must be updated to make sure that it can handle all types of new and improved types threats. Each antivirus has a vault that contains the threats information and that must be up to date.
Public key Infrastructure or PKI is a tool that is used for verifying the identity of the receiver and helps to send and receive the data securely. It helps to distribute and identify the public encrypting keys.
Normally PKI is associated with the SSL and TLS technology which helps to secure the information transfer between the sever and user using the HTTPS.
Penetration testing is the method of checking the security systems quality by identifying any of the security vulnerabilities are there in the system. Normally an Ethical hacker will do the job for the organization.
Ethical hackers try to penetrate the security system of the organization like a hacker to check if he can find any vulnerable points to enter into the security system. They are using the same methods and tricks an original hacker will do to penetrate into a cyber-security system.
If they succeed in penetration, the ethical hackers will make the solution to close that vulnerability by discussing with the cyber security team of the organization.
MDR stands for Managed Detection and Response Service. It is the most modern type of security system that can help in treating detection, threat intelligence, monitoring, threat analysis, and attack response with the help of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.
In the latest times, the attackers are using the best tools and methods for hacking and other malicious activities. The need for the best defense also arises because of such cyber criminals. In addition, MDR is the answer for that.
MDR has the following characteristics
The other categories of cyber security tools include
Now let us check the latest tools that are used in cyber security inside the categories we discussed above.
To discuss all the tools used in cyber security is beyond our scope, so we are here discussing some important tools that we use for cyber security presently
A Linux operating system provides a number of tools for scanning a network, auditing the security, and scanning for any malicious activity in the system. The most important advantage of the Kali Linux operating system is that it offers tools for all levels of cyber security experts.
It is easy to use kali operating system tools for even a beginner. It offers tools that are easily executable, monitor, and detect the network of the organization.
Cain and Abel are the cyber security tools that run on windows, which help to detect the password strength in the applications and machines that run on windows. It helps the security experts to find password security vulnerabilities. It is one of the free and old security tools used in the case of password recovery on windows.
Metasploit is a set of tools that are used in penetration testing. It is the best tool for ethical hackers to check and analyze the vulnerabilities of the security system and helps in improvement while doing penetration testing.
It can able to check even the upcoming vulnerabilities and detect the chance of being vulnerable in the future. It helps in analyzing the web products and servers too.
Wireshark is an open-source, a network security tool that is used for packet sniffing and auditing passwords. The Wireshark tool is used to monitor the network traffic and sniff the packets in real-time. It also helps to check the network protocols and increase security.
Security experts use this cyber security tool to analyze the traffic and to check the features of a packet by capturing the data packet from the network traffic.
John the Ripper is a password strength check tool that helps to check weak passwords. It helps to analyze the complex encryption and ciphers for any presence of weak passwords. It works in almost all operating systems.
NIKTO is a cyber-security tool that is used for websites and web-related products, which can detect vulnerabilities and can able to make the steps to solve such vulnerabilities.
NIKTO has a huge database that contains all the details about 6400 threats and the cyber security experts are updating more and more vulnerabilities into the database so that it can identify new threats easily.
Forcepoint is a cyber-security tool mainly for cloud users. It helps to block different types of intrusion attempts. It also helps to monitor the network traffic and detect any malicious activity in the traffic and make necessary actions to prevent them.
A web-based security tool is used to monitor real-time network activities. It also helps to analyze and detect web products vulnerabilities. PAROS proxy is a core java based cyber security tool.
NMAP is also called Network Mapper. It can able to scan the network and identify any untrusted devices. Cyber security professionals are using NMAP for scanning a network for vulnerabilities and untrusted devices.
Truecrypt as the name suggests, is one of the most commonly used and most popular cyber security tools for encryption. It can easily encrypt a part or even a full storage media and can make virtually encrypted disks.
Truecrypt is one of the best encryption tools that has been used for years without any change or update. It helps cyber security experts to make layered encrypted content.
TOR is a powerful cyber security tool that is been used for browsing and checking the network without anyone detects it. TOR is mainly used to protect the privacy of the users while accessing the web. It is efficient in protecting users from cyber security threats. We usually heard of TOR browsers related to deep and dark web access.
A security tool helps us to protect our data from stealing. Lifelock can able to lock our sensitive data with a single click. It helps to protect our home devices, can able to provide VPN services, Can easily lock the data from stealing, can able to scan and alert about the emails.
Bitdefender is a popular antivirus program that can able to scan our systems and devices on request. It can able to protect our systems from various threats that include viruses, Worms, Trojans, Spywares, Adware, Keylogger, etc. Bitdefender can also provide security to our emails and online activities. It helps in providing VPN and secure banking while using the system.
As the name suggests, Malwarebytes is a cyber-security tool that provides security from malware, adware, ransomware, and websites which contain malicious activities.
Malwarebytes offers secure accessing the internet and can able to clean the infected devices and systems.
VIPRE is another cyber security tool that helps us to protect from spam emails and malware. It blocks such messages, emails, and websites so that helps to provide safe browsing.
VIPRE helps in removing all the traces of a file permanently and also monitors the network traffic. With the help of VIPRE, you can clean your browsing history and all the information.
Sitelock is a cyber-security tool that is been used by websites to protect themselves and their visitors from cyber-attacks. Sitelock offers services like malware detection and protection from SQL injection.
With Sitelock we can scan as many web pages as you need and it can monitor the blacklist of Google. Sitelock produce a weekly report on scanning and information.
Mimecast is a cyber-security tool that gives protection to emails services. It also helps to safeguard from the websites that contain malicious activity. Mimecast can able to detect all types of cyber-attacks easily and efficiently, block such attacks before it infects our systems and network.
Solar winds security event manager is a cyber-security tool that helps to monitor and analyze the host traffic for any intrusions. It can able to monitoring, report, and take necessary action in real-time in case of intrusions and cyber-attacks.
It has a huge database and it will be always updated. Solar winds can be easily used in cloud systems too. It has incorporated a well-defined set of reporting tools.
There is a huge collection of cyber security tools available in the market, which comes under the categories we discussed above, and mentioning all of them is beyond the scope of this tutorial.
