We have seen reports of test teams that only consisted of the output of a commercial vulnerability scanner like ISS. Although automated vulnerability scanners are great tools to reduce the amount of time needed to do a legal hack we are convinced that these tools are no replacement for a highly skilled legal hack team, especially with internal legal hacks or external application tests. IT analyst Gartner appears to agree on this: "Although automated scanning and other tools can be employed during legal hacking, it is a labor-intensive activity and an unlikely candidate for complete automation…".
Test teams normally use one or more laptops equipped with different operating systems and test tools. Most of these tools are open source tools. This means that the source of these tools is available which gives the probability to check for back doors or other malicious code. This also makes it possible to adjust these tools to specific environments and systems to be tested. Some test teams also use custom made tools that can automate part of the test process or tools that are specifically written to test a certain system. Clearly, this requires programming skills within the test team.
Tools that are often used during the different phases are:
Apart from the specified tools various operating system utilities and resource kit tools are used.