Top 100 Network Security Tools

Insecure.org has released a 2006 survey of 3,243 people (users from the nmap-hackers mailing list) about their favorite security tools. The tools include open source as well as commercial products on any platform. The last survey was done by insecure.org in 2003.

The tools are broken down by various attributes, as shown below.

Nessus, Wireshark and Snort took the top three spots. Check out the rest of the list here. While some tools on the list, such as Google (which was #34) and VMware (#89 on the list) are not really security tools, they were still listed by the users because in case of Google, they use it as a resource for security information and because Google can also be used for hacking. VMware is used as a tool to test code and exploits on various platforms. Microsoft’s MBSA (Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer) was #100 on the top 100 list.