Mike’s Cool Tools
| Cool Tool | Description |
|---|---|
| CompTIA Protocols & Ports PDF | A quick reference for the protocols and their ports on the CompTIA trifecta certs! |
| CPUID’s CPU-Z | The utility to find out the specs of the CPU on your system. |
| CPUID’s HWMonitor | Great little program that gives you a quick break down of your system’s temperature and other sensors. From the maker of CPU-Z. |
| Igor Pavlov’s 7-Zip | A free, open-source utility that unzips almost everything you can through at it. I install it on all my systems. |
| Malwarebytes Free | When you need to scrub a machine of some nasty malware, this utility will help you get the job done. |
| Memtest86+ | The live CD memory tester. This tool boots from a CD and gives your RAM a workout looking for problems that can cause errors such as BSODs and data coruption. |
| Microsoft’s Sysinternals Utilities | The definitive collection of utilities to discover and fix almost anything going on with Windows. My personal favorite is Process Explorer. |
| Gnome Partition Editor | Gnome Partition Editor, or GParted, is another live CD that will enable you to resize and repartition your hard drive without reformating. Make sure you have a backup before using this or any paritioning tool on a system you care about. |
| Wireshark | Everyone should have this famous protocol analyzer in their toolbox. |
| VirtualBox | The freeware VM that’s great for getting your feet wet with virtualization. |
| Rufus | When I need to make a bootable thumb drive this is my goto utility |
| Versacrypt | Bitlocker is great if you have the right version of Windows, a TPM chip and want to encrypt an entire drive. For those who don’t, there is Versacrypt. |
| Nmap | The best network security scanner out there! (Included in Kali distro) |
| Metasploit | The number one penetration testing framework (Included in Kali distro) |
| OpenHash Tab | OpenHashTab is a shell extension for conveniently calculating and checking file hashes from file properties. |
| Kali Linux | The popular security-centric Linux distro. Contains many of the tools listed here |