1. John the Ripper
- Wikipedia Link: John the Ripper
- Description: John the Ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix, macOS, Windows, DOS, BeOS, and OpenVMS. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords.
2. Hydra
- Wikipedia Link: Hydra (software)
- Description: THC-Hydra is a very fast network logon cracker which supports many different services. It is highly efficient in cracking passwords for various protocols and services.
3. Hashcat
- Wikipedia Link: Hashcat
- Description: Hashcat is a robust password recovery tool. It supports five unique modes of attack for over 300 highly optimized hashing algorithms.
4. Aircrack-ng
- Wikipedia Link: Aircrack-ng
- Description: Aircrack-ng is a complete suite of tools to assess WiFi network security. It focuses on different areas of WiFi security, including monitoring, attacking, testing, and cracking.
5. Cain and Abel
- Wikipedia Link: Cain and Abel (software)
- Description: Cain and Abel is a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of various kinds of passwords by sniffing the network, cracking encrypted passwords, and more.
6. Medusa
- Wikipedia Link: Medusa (tool)
- Description: Medusa is a speedy, parallel, and modular login brute-forcer. The tool is designed to be both modular and robust, allowing it to be easily extended to support additional protocols.
7. RainbowCrack
- Wikipedia Link: RainbowCrack
- Description: RainbowCrack is a general-purpose implementation of Philippe Oechslin’s faster time-memory trade-off technique. It uses precomputed tables to crack password hashes efficiently.
8. Ophcrack
- Wikipedia Link: Ophcrack
- Description: Ophcrack is a free Windows password cracker based on rainbow tables. It is a very efficient implementation of rainbow tables and comes with a graphical user interface.
9. Brutus
- Wikipedia Link: Brutus (software)
- Description: Brutus is one of the fastest, most flexible remote password crackers you can get your hands on. It supports HTTP (Basic Authentication), HTTP (HTML Form/CGI), POP3, FTP, SMB, and Telnet.
10. SQLmap
- Wikipedia Link: SQLmap
- Description: SQLmap is an open-source penetration testing tool that automates the process of detecting and exploiting SQL injection flaws and taking over of database servers.
These tools are commonly used for penetration testing and security research. Note that ethical use of these tools is paramount, and they should only be used in environments where you have explicit permission to test the security.
