Recommended tools for penetration testing home server and network?

[NeverDie]

The idea would be to find and fix vulnerabilities before a blackhat somewhere discovers and exploits them.

Any favorites, suggestions, or recommendations?

 

[RTM]

What type of tools are we talking about? and what about costs?

If you are looking for something that you can run with little to no knowledge, you can look into software like OpenVAS, Nessus or Nexpose.
In this area Nessus is probably the gold standard, although it will cost money if you use it commercially (there is a free home version).
OpenVAS is very similar (it was originally based on an old version of Nessus) but free and from what I've heard not quite as good plugin support.
Nexpose also exists in a free "community" version.

If you are looking for a collection of tools, you want to be looking at Kali Linux, OpenVAS is included in Kali.

 

[dba]

You can usually get a time-limited trial version of even the best commercial security tools for free, and that's often good enough for home use. I'd take a look at Nessus and Rapid7 for vulnerability scanning, and at SecTools.Org Top Network Security Tools to see a broad view of the security tools that might be useful for you. Of course all of these tools will throw hundreds or thousands of alerts at you, so first spend some time cleaning up the vulnerabilities that you already know about, including shutting down ports you don't use and putting everything that you can behind a VPN with two-factory authentication, etc.

 

[whitey]

Backtrack toolkit and Metasploit framework are staples in this arena as well. Check them out. Good mention on sectools, start there as well, wealth of knowledge there. Insecure.org (folks who run the sectools site) have some good high level goodies parked there. Setting up SNORT/SPAN and probing services being that IDS injection point w/ nmap is always fun on a down day :-D

 

[Chuckleb]

I've been meaning to get Duo set up at home for 2-factor, us quite nice. Small license free for home/lab use as well.

 

[RTM]

Backtrack toolkit and Metasploit framework are staples in this arena as well. Check them out.

Just a minor correction: Backtrack has been superseded by Kali Linux by the authors (offensive security).
And for the record, Metasploit is available in Kali Linux

If you want to play around with IDS' etc. you might want to look into the security onion linux distribution.

 

[whitey]

Just a minor correction: Backtrack has been superseded by Kali Linux by the authors (offensive security).
And for the record, Metasploit is available in Kali Linux

If you want to play around with IDS' etc. you might want to look into the security onion linux distribution.

NICE, been a good yr or two since I used backtrack last.

 

[modder man]

thread revival, but I liked the topic. Does Nessus need to be run from outside the network or inside?

 

[RTM]

thread revival, but I liked the topic. Does Nessus need to be run from outside the network or inside?

You can do either, Nessus will happily scan internal and external networks.

 

[JustinH]

Depends on your use case. If you want to see what outsiders see, best to run it outside your network. Then you only fix what is exposed. If your worried a family member might hack your server(!) then scan from inside your network