Best Penetration Testing Resources for Beginners

Penetration testing simulates a real-world cyber-attack on any firm or company. A penetration tester is a network security consultant, they find possible breaches in your system.

They generally are expected to run various tests and generate an assessment sheet that will explain vulnerability in the network or system.

Here we will go through all the necessary vulnerability assessment and penetration testing resources.

Tools necessary for starting penetration testing

1. Kali Linux

An open-source project by offensive security. Kali is a Debian based operating system made for advance Penetration testing and security audits.

Why Kali Linux?

Lots of inbuilt Pentest tools included like
- Hydra
- John The Ripper
- Aircrack-ng
Open-source
Custom kernel, patched for injection
Secure environment
Filesystem Hierarchy Standard compliant

2. Nessus

Nessus is a vulnerability scanner developed and maintained by Tenable. It is also known as a “Remote scanner” as it doesn’t need to be installed on a specific machine. Nessus scans vulnerabilities related to the provided IP.

Why Nessus?

Nessus is very extensible, providing a scripting language for you to write tests.
provides multiple special-purpose plugins.
vulnerability patch assistance
updated information of the latest attacks and vulnerabilities.

3. Burp Suite

Burp Suite is a vulnerability scanner by PortSwigger, basically used for web security. It can be used to test loopholes in website security by intercepting and analyzing packet.

Why burp?

wide range of automating plugins
Easy to use
Scheduled and repeat scans
Unlimited scalability
CI integration
Essential manual tools

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OWASP Top 10 Vulnerability and preventions.
These are very important from the point of view of your website. Do check if you have some vulnerabilities in your website.

metasploit used for vulnerability testing with payloads.

Metasploit is used to find security issues. It also manages security assessment and vulnerability mitigations. Metasploit is a penetration testing platform that enables you to exploit and validate vulnerabilities also.

Why Metasploit?

Open-source
Free tool
Huge list of exploits and payloads
Widely used and trusted in the IT security community

5. Acunetix

Fully automated web security testing platform. Makes tester’s task easy which was previously going to take hours. test for thousands of web application vulnerabilities (including SQL Injection, XSS) as well as misconfigurations.