50 Best Hacking Tools!

Hacking tools have been said to make hacking quite easy as compared to the old days. But, there is still more to being a hacker than just that. Yes, these tools have made it simple, but that is nothing unless you have the knowledge about other aspects of hacking as well. We present tp you a set of must-have hacking tools.

Wireless Hacking: These are tools that help you hack into wireless networks. Wireless hacking tools though useful, do not make you a complete hacker. In order to achieve that, you must learn the different ways in which a secure network can be accessed. Also, you should work on making your own network as secure as possible.

1. Aircrack-ng

2. Kismet

3. inSSIDer

4. KisMAC

Intrusion Detection Systems: Intrusion detection tools are one of the most important part of any security arrangement. They allow you to detect those threats that are potentially dangerous for your system.

1. Snort

2. NetCop

Port Scanners

1. Nmap

2. Superscan

3. Angry IP Scanner

Encryption Tools: In an age where more and more governments are being found spying on their own citizens, encryption is the word of the day. These tools allow you to encrypt your data so that even if someone does get through, they can’t get to the data easily.

1. TrueCrypt

2. OpenSSH

3. Putty

4. OpenSSL

5. Tor

6. OpenVPN

7. Stunnel

8. KeePass

Password Crackers: The name is pretty self explanatory in this case. These tools help you recover passwords from the data that a computer system is storing or transmitting over a network.

1. Ophcrack

2. Medusa

3. RainbowCrack

4. Wfuzz

5. Brutus

6. L0phtCrack

7. fgdump

8. THC Hydra

9. John The Ripper

10. Aircrack - Aircrack is 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking program.

11. Cain and Abel

Packet Crafting: Packet crafting is the technique through which an attacker finds vulnerabilities or entry points within your firewall. These tools help you achieve that more easily.

1. Hping

2. Scapy

3. Netcat

4. Yersinia

5. Nemesis

6. Socat

Traffic Monitoring: These are tools that let you monitor what websites your employees or children are monitoring.

1. Splunk

2. Nagios

3. P0f

4. Ngrep

Packet Sniffers: These are tools that can allow you to capture and visualise the traffic that is coming on your website.

1. Wireshark

2. Tcpdump

3. Ettercap

4. dsniff

5. EtherApe

Vulnerability Exploitation: These are the tools that you would use in order to gain access to various places.

1. Metasploit

2. sqlmap

3. sqlninja

4. Social Engineer Toolkit

5. NetSparker

6. BeEF

7. Dradis

For 50 more of such free hacking tools, click here

14 Hilarious New Programming Jargon!

While working on one thing over the years, all of us make our own funny work jargon that becomes a part of our everyday communication. We came through one such funny list of jargon compiled by the co-founder of the question-and-answer website Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network, Jeff Atwood. Here are some of them for you, read out with your co programmers and have fun! Who knows you already share some of these!

1. Jimmy

A generalized name for the clueless/new developer. "What if Jimmy forgets to update the attribute?"

This led to the term: "Jimmy-proof" when referring to well designed framework code.

2. Refuctoring

The process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself.

3. Yoda Conditions

Using if(constant == variable) instead of if(variable == constant), like if(4 == foo). Because it's like saying "if blue is the sky" or "if tall is the man".

4. Nopping

Nopping comes from assembler NOP for no-operation. It's similar to 'nap', but doesn't imply sleep, just zoning out. "Stanislav sat watching the screensaver and nopped for a while."

5. Unicorny

An adjective to describe a feature that's so early in the planning stages that it might as well be imaginary.

6. Baklava Code

Code with too many layers. Baklava is a delicious pastry made with many paper-thin layers of phyllo dough. While thin layers are fine for a pastry, thin software layers don’t add much value, especially when you have many such layers piled on each other.

7. Fear Driven Development

When project management adds more pressure (fires someone, moves deadlines forward, subtracts resources from the project, etc).

8. Hydra Code

Code that cannot be fixed. Like the Hydra of legend, every new fix introduces two new bugs. It should be rewritten.

9. Loch Ness Monster Bug

Anything not reproducible/only sighted by one person.

10. Ninja Comments

Also known as invisible comments, secret comments, or no comments.

11. Rubber Ducking

Sometimes, you just have to talk a problem out. You go to your boss and talk about something and he'd listen and then you will end up answering your own question and walk out without him saying a thing. So rather put a rubber duck on your monitor so you could talk to it. So rubberducking is talking your way through a problem.

12. Mad Girlfriend Bug

When you see something strange happening, but the software is telling you everything is fine.

13. Hooker Code

Code that is problematic and causes application instability (application "goes down" often). "Did the site go down again? Yeah, must still have some hooker code in there."

14. Higgs-Bugson

A hypothetical bug predicted to exist based on a small number of possibly related event log entries and vague anecdotal reports from users, but it is difficult (if not impossible) to reproduce on a dev machine because you don't really know if it's there, and if it is there what is causing it.

29 Free eBooks On Databases, Data Mining And Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval, Databases and data mining are the current in thing in the IT world! Learn more about the subject with these 29 absolutely free ebooks for online reading and downloading. Happy reading!

1. Theory and Applications for Advanced Text Mining
by Shigeaki Sakurai (ed.) - InTech , 2012
Text mining techniques are studied aggressively in order to extract the knowledge from the data. This book introduces advanced text mining techniques. There are various techniques from relation extraction to under or less resourced language.

2. Foundations of Databases
by Serge Abiteboul, Richard Hull, Victor Vianu - Addison Wesley , 1994
This book provides in-depth coverage of the theory concerning the logical level of database management systems, including both classical and advanced topics. It includes detailed proofs and numerous examples and exercises.

3. Internet Advertising
by S. Yuan, A.Z. Abidin, M. Sloan, J. Wang - arXiv , 2012
A comprehensive survey on Internet advertising, discussing the research issues, identifying the recent technologies, and suggesting its future directions. We start with a brief history, introduction, and classification of the industry.

4. The Theory of Relational Databases
by David Maier - Computer Science Press , 1983
The book is intended for a second course in databases and a reference for researchers in the field. The material covered includes relational algebra, functional dependencies, multivalued and join dependencies, normal forms, representation theory...

5. Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce
by Jimmy Lin, Chris Dyer - Morgan & Claypool Publishers , 2010
This book focuses on MapReduce algorithm design, with an emphasis on text processing algorithms common in natural language processing, information retrieval, and machine learning. We introduce the notion of MapReduce design patterns.

6. Data Mining Algorithms In R
- Wikibooks , 2010
Data mining comprises techniques and algorithms, for determining interesting patterns from large datasets. There are currently hundreds algorithms that perform tasks such as frequent pattern mining, clustering, and classification, among others.

7. An Introduction to Data Mining
by Saed Sayad - University of Toronto , 2011
Data Mining is about explaining the past and predicting the future by means of data analysis. Data mining is a multidisciplinary field which combines statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and database technology.

8. Mining of Massive Datasets
by Anand Rajaraman, Jeffrey D. Ullman - Stanford University , 2010
At the highest level of description, this book is about data mining. However, it focuses on data mining of very large amounts of data. Because of the emphasis on size, many of our examples are about the Web or data derived from the Web.

9. Information Retrieval: A Survey
by Ed Greengrass - University of Maryland , 2000
This is a survey of the state of the art in the dynamic field of information retrieval. Topics covered include: formulation of queries and topic statements, indexing of document collections, methods for computing the similarity of documents, etc.

10. Database Fundamentals
by Neeraj Sharma, at al. - IBM Corporation , 2010
This free e-book teaches you the fundamentals of databases, including relational database theory, logical and physical database design, and the SQL language. Advanced topics include using functions, stored procedures and XML.

11. Multi-Relational Data Mining
by Arno Jan Knobbe - IOS Press , 2006
This thesis is concerned with Data Mining: extracting useful insights from large collections of data. With the increased possibilities in modern society for companies and institutions to gather data, this subject has become of increasing importance.

12. Natural Language Interfaces to Databases: An Introduction
by I. Androutsopoulos, G. D. Ritchie, P. Thanisch - arXiv , 1995
This paper is an introduction to natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDBs). Some advantages and disadvantages of NLIDBs are then discussed, comparing NLIDBs to formal query languages, form-based interfaces, and graphical interfaces.

13. Readings in Database Systems
by J. M. Hellerstein, M. Stonebraker - UC Berkeley , 1999
These lecture notes provide students and professionals with a grounding in database research and a technical context for understanding recent innovations in the field. The readings included treat the most important issues in the database area.

14. Database Systems and Structures
by Osmar R. Zaiane - Simon Fraser University , 1998
An introduction to data models, database systems, the structure and use of relational database systems and relational languages, indexing and storage management, query processing in relational databases, and the theory of relational database design.

15. Data Mining Desktop Survival Guide
by Graham Williams - Togaware Pty Ltd , 2004
Data mining is about building models from data. We build models to gain insights into the world and how the world works. A data miner, in building models, deploys many different data analysis and model building techniques.

16. Introduction to Metadata
by Tony Gill, at al. - Getty Publications , 2008
This book provides an overview of metadata, its types, roles, and characteristics; a discussion of metadata as it relates to resources on the Web; a description of methods, tools, standards, and protocols used to publish digital collections; etc.

17. Database design with UML and SQL
by Tom Jewett , 2006
This text is a teaching resource for an introductory database class at California State University Long Beach, Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science. It is also designed to be used as an individual self-study tutorial.

18. The Relational Model for Database Management
by E. F. Codd - Addison-Wesley , 1990
Written by the originator of the relational model, the book covers the practical aspects of the design of relational databases. The author defines twelve rules that database management systems need to follow in order to be described as relational.

19. An Introduction to Relational Database Theory
by Hugh Darwen - BookBoon , 2009
This book introduces the theory of relational databases, focusing on the application of that theory to the design of computer languages that properly embrace it. The book covers different topics: Types, Variables, Operators, Relational Algebra, etc.

20. XML and Databases
by Ronald Bourret , 2005
This paper gives a high-level overview of how to use XML with databases. It describes how the differences between data-centric and document-centric documents affect their usage with databases and how XML is commonly used with relational databases.

21. Data Mining in Medical and Biological Research
by Eugenia G. Giannopoulou - InTech , 2008
This book brings together the most recent advances of data mining research in the promising areas of medicine and biology. It consists of seventeen chapters which describe interesting applications, motivating progress and worthwhile results.

22. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Real Life Applications
by Julio Ponce, Adem Karahoca - InTech , 2009
This book presents different ways of theoretical and practical advances and applications of data mining in different promising areas. The book will serve as a Data Mining bible to show a right way for the students, researchers and practitioners.

23. Storage Basics: An Introduction to the Fundamentals of Storage Technology
- Fujitsu Siemens Computers , 2009
This book is an introduction to storage technologies and storage networks. It also provides an overview of the storage product portfolio of Fujitsu Siemens Computers which is the basis for solutions that help you manage the growing flood of data.

24. Data Modeling Techniques for Data Warehousing
by Chuck Ballard, et al. - IBM Redbooks , 1998
It covers data modeling techniques for data warehousing, within the context of the overall data warehouse development process. The process of data warehouse modeling, including the steps required before and after the actual modeling, is discussed.

25. Information Retrieval
by C. J. van Rijsbergen - Butterworth-Heinemann , 1979
The material of this book is aimed at advanced undergraduate information or computer science students, postgraduate library science students, and research workers in the field of IR. There is a new chapter on probabilistic retrieval.

26. Forensic Analysis of Database Tampering
by Kyriacos E. Pavlou, Richard T. Snodgrass - University of Arizona , 2008
The text on detection via cryptographic hashing. The authors show how to determine when the tampering occurred, what data was tampered, and who did the tampering. Four successively more sophisticated forensic analysis algorithms are presented.

27. Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems
by P. A. Bernstein, V. Hadzilacos, N. Goodman - Addison Wesley , 1987
This book is about techniques for concurrency control and recovery. It covers techniques for centralized and distributed computer systems, and for single copy, multiversion, and replicated databases. Example applications are included.

28. Information Retrieval Interaction
by Peter Ingwersen - Taylor Graham Publishing , 2002
The book establishes a unifying scientific approach to IR – a synthesis based on the concept of IR interaction and the Cognitive Viewpoint. It present research and developments in the field of information retrieval based on a new categorisation.

29. Introduction to Information Retrieval
by Manning, Raghavan, Schütze - Cambridge University Press , 2008
This textbook teaches web-era information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering from basic concepts. It is written from a computer science perspective by three leading experts in the field.

10 Reasons To Choose Linux Over Apple's OS X

OS X, the Unix-based graphical interface operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. is considered to be more user-friendly, but Linux in many regards is much better.

But if you still love OS X then according to zdnet, here are ten reasons that might just change your opinion.

• Flexibility: OS X, as you know is user-friendly but not very flexible like Windows. There is not much that you can do with it. You can’t customize it as per your requirement. But with Linux, it is a different story. Linux can configure itself the way you want.

• Open source: One of the issues that Linux users have with OS X is the license. Apple took a BSD kernel to create its own Darwin kernel, and released it under the Apple Public Source License. It then layered on top of that proprietary software to create OS X. At one point, Apple created OpenDarwin, but that failed too. In 2007, PureDarwin was created to continue the work that was developed with OpenDarwin. PureDarwin has come a long way and can even run Linux-based window managers. However, OS X, is still locked tightly together and can’t compete with the openness of Linux.

• Command line: Although most OS X users say that they don’t need command line, most users know the importance of command line in serious administrative tasks. But with OS X, you can’t do everything you need from the command line. OS X does have a set of command-line tools, but for the power admin, it is not enough.

• Hardware requirements: Even in hardware equipment, if you compare the two, Linux is much faster. Obviously, Linux can run on lesser powered machines by default. And Ubuntu 8.10 is not the most optimized of the Linux distributions. Mandriva Spring 2008 has fewer requirements. Though some claim that OS X outperforms Ubuntu 8.10 soundly, the real world results are contradictory. When you tend to run many applications, the machine crawls.

• Security: In the recent “Pwn 2 Own” competition, both the OS X and the Windows Vista machines were hacked, whereas the Linux machine was not. Of course there are counter arguments. OS X is not unsecure but Linux is better equipped in security with tools like iptables, fwbuilder, and SELinux. Linux can lock down in many ways, on many levels.

• Portability: Linux shines over all other operating systems in its ability to migrate an installation from hardware to hardware. Linux has an uncanny ability to relocate. You can move the complete hard drive from one machine to another. So long as the architecture was the same, the migration seemed to work with little to no adjusting. OS X, on the other hand, is landlocked to the machine it is installed in. Also, with Linux, you can take certain directories and move them.

• Cost: Linux is free. OS X is currently selling for $129.00 plus the hardware cost. The cheapest Macbook you can purchase is $999.00. You can purchase a $399.00 laptop that will run Linux from any dealer plus the cost of the software. With Linux, you can have an office-ready machine that will tackle most every task. So if you’re looking to cut costs, Linux is the way to go.

• More available software: Though surprising, Linux has far more software available than OS X. Turn to Google and search for OS X Software and Linux Software. The results: OS X 19,100,000 hits. Linux 45,700,000 hits. One of the things that separate Linux from other operating systems is that for every task in Linux, there are numerous tools available.

• Not so dumbed-down: One thing that Apple did with OS X is dumb down the operating system interface to the point where all tasks are easy for anyone to do. But some would not want that dumbed-down experience. With Linux, you can have a desktop experience on every level. You can have the full-on, dumbed-down experience akin to OS X with either GNOME or KDE. Or you can go to the complete opposite and use the console as your desktop.With OS X, many users feel trifled but with Linux, you can let go of that .

• Keyboard efficiency: One problem with OS X is that there is no normally functioning Delete key. Instead you have to hit fn + Delete to get the delete key to work as it should. And it’s not just the Delete key. The End key doesn’t do what you would expect, either. To get to the end of the line, you have to add the fn key to the End key. Mouse button is a fundamental design and the majority of people like two mouse buttons. With Linux, you get three mouse buttons. With those you can even do a simple copy and paste function. The Linux keyboard is just far more efficient than the OS X keyboard.

11 IDEs For Windows, MAC and Linux Platforms!

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) are an integral part of every programmer or software developer's arsenal. You would have heard of names like the Eclipse IDE and others. Well, different IDEs are suited to different platforms. There are also multi platform IDEs. Here are some IDEs for Windows, MAC and Linux platforms.

Windows: Microsoft's Windows operating system is the most popular OS in the market. Because of this, many developers prefer to create tools that can support this platform. This is also true for IDEs. There are various IDEs that are available for programmers working on the Windows OS. While what's good and what's not remains a matter of personal choice, here are five that you can check out.

1. Visual Web Developer

2. phpDesigner

3. PHPEdit

4. Visual Studio 2008

5. Expression Web

MAC: Apple's MAC operating system is built on the Unix shell. Even though it is a proprietary OS, which comes at a pretty high price and works only on Apple computers, it has a decent following. It's not known to be the most popular amongst programmers, but web designers, audio professionals etc. often prefer working on it. The following are two IDEs that work on Apple's platform.

1. Coda

2. CSSEdit

Linux IDEs: Linux is by far the most popular platform amongst programmers around the world. It is free and open source, which makes it customisable. In addition, there are various tools that come specially suited to hacking and programming using Linux. Some of the IDEs that work on this platform at the most popular in the programming community. Here are some names.

1. BlueFish

2. Komodo IDE

3. NetBeans

4. Eclipse

12 Eclipse Plugins That Every Developer Should Know!

Eclipse is amongst the most popular integrated development environments (IDE) nowadays. The IDE supports a wide variety of plugins, which can be added to it. Through these, developers can extend Eclipse’s capabilities and customise the IDE to suit their particular needs. The following is a list of the top 12 such plugins that can make applications development a breeze.

Subclipse and Subversive: Both of these plugins handle the subversion of repositories. In addition, they also handle the major tasks related to version control as well.

EGit: This one uses the Git version control system and is a popular plugin for managing users’ source codes and projects. It also uses the JGit library, which is a Java-based core that you can download separately.

m2eclipse: Ever heard of the Apache Maven build tool? This software project management and comprehension tool can be integrated into Eclipse using the m2eclipse plugin.

Eclipse Marketplace Client: This client may already be installed on your system. The Eclipse Foundation, the company behind the IDE, has been making its marketplace a part of the software itself. It tracks your downloads and perform other activities.

FindBugs: This is an auditor that gives you an extra edge for finding bugs. The plugin comes with numerous bug patterns programmed into it and searches through your code to find the bugs and shows them in Eclipse. The results are sometimes arguable, but it’s still a pretty handy tool.

Checkstyle: This tool makes it easy for everyone working on a project to follow the same rules for coding. It makes it much easier to understand everyone’s code and the developer can also program Checkstyle to follow the rules that they like.

Hibernate: When you need to turn data into Java objects, this is the best plugin available. It goes into the SQL database and returns with every Java file that need to be turned into Java objects. The plugin reverse engineers a database within seconds.

UML Designer: UML stands for Unified Modeling Language and is a standard for constructing, specifying and documenting the elements of object oriented programming projects. It also helps with the tree representation of XML.

Ant Visualizer: This visualizer parses the XML and turns it into a bunch of blocks, which allows you to imagine how a build process advances.

Unnecessary Code Detector: When a code project is finished, a programmer is often left with the task of removing unnecessary code that has been put into it. This plugin works like a charm in such cases. It places little flags in order to show you, which methods in the code are unnecessary.

JFormDesigner: This plugin is useful if you are building desktop applications in Swing and porting them to the internet using the Google Web Toolkit. This is a tool that helps you draw the user interface.

Color Theme: This plugin has a number of colouring schemes for your files and you can use these wherever you want.

12 Penetration Testing Add-Ons For Firefox

Firefox is not popular only for its open source nature but it can also be turned into a very effective penetration testing tool. Mozilla has its own section for add-ons and all of the following are available. Here they are...

1. FoxyProxy Standard: This advance proxy management add-on for the Firefox internet browser supplements the built-in proxy capabilities of Firefox. The add-on switches the user’s internet connection over one or more proxy servers based on the URL patterns and has many other features as well.

2. Firebug: This tool allows the user to debug and edit JavaScript, HTML and CSS live on a webpage and see the changes take effect. The add-on is useful for analysing JavaScript files for XSS vulnerabilities.

3. Web Developer: This add-on helps in penetration testing by adding various web development tools to Firefox.

4. User Agent Switcher: This add-on is useful if you want to spoof your browser while attacking a network. It places a tool bar on the browser that lets you switch between user agent and browser seamlessly.

5. Live HTTP Headers: The add-on displays live headers for each of the HTTP requests and responses on Firefox. It also allows the user to save header information by a click of a button. It is a really helpful tool for penetration testers.

6. Tamper Data: This add-on is quite similar to the one above, but it brings the added header editing capacity to Firefox. The user can view and then modify HTTP and HTTPS headers and post parameters. You can use it for penetration testing for web applications by modifying the POST parameters. It can also be used to make XSS and SQL Injection attacks.

7. Hackbar: This penetration testing tool for Firefox helps the user in testing simple SQL injection and XSS loopholes through Firefox. In addition, the add-on also has encoding and encryption tools, which can help in testing XSS vulnerability using encoded XSS payloads.

8. Websecurify: This add-on can detect most of the common vulnerabilities in any web applications. It is a complete penetration testing tool that can be added to the Firefox brower.

9. Add N Edit Cookies: As the name suggests, this Firefox browser lets the user add or edit the cookies data for the browser. It is quite useful for penetration testing, especially when trying to perform session hijacks.

10. XSS Me: This add-on helps in detecting XSS vulnerabilities in web applications. It scans all the different forms of a web page and then attacks the pages that qualify with a predefined XSS payload.

11. SQL Inject Me: This one helps in finding SQL injection vulnerabilities in web applications. It displays the vulnerabilities in a web application without exploiting them.

12. FlagFox: This browser adds a country’s flag on Firefox and determines where a web server is located. The add-on also has a web server.