Software Recomendations

Here is a list of software that may be useful or required in your CIS classes

Audio

Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software, available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems.


Audacity's Website

Cyber Security

Aircrack-ng is a network software suite consisting of a detector, packet sniffer, WEP and WPA/WPA2-PSK cracker and analysis tool for 802.11 wireless LANs. It works with any wireless network interface controller whose driver supports raw monitoring mode and can sniff 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g traffic.


Aircrack-ng's Website

Autopsy is computer software that makes it simpler to deploy many of the open source programs and plugins used in The Sleuth Kit. The graphical user interface displays the results from the forensic search of the underlying volume making it easier for investigators to flag pertinent sections of data.


Autopsy's Website

EnCase is the shared technology within a suite of digital investigations products by Guidance Software. The software comes in several products designed for forensic, cyber security, security analytics, and e-discovery use. EnCase is traditionally used in forensics to recover evidence from seized hard drives.


EnCase Forensic's Website

FTK Imager is a data preview and imaging tool that lets you quickly assess electronic evidence to determine if further analysis with a forensic tool such as Forensic Toolkit (FTK) is warranted.


FTK Imager's Website

Hashcat is a password recovery tool. It had a proprietary code base until 2015, but was then released as open source software. Versions are available for Linux, OS X, and Windows.


Hashcat's Website

John the Ripper is a free password cracking software tool. Originally developed for the Unix operating system, it can run on fifteen different platforms.


John the Ripper's Website

Malwarebytes is an anti-malware software for Microsoft Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, Android, and iOS that finds and removes malware. Made by Malwarebytes Corporation, it was first released in January 2006.


Malwarebytes's Website

The Metasploit Project is a computer security project that provides information about security vulnerabilities and aids in penetration testing and IDS signature development. It is owned by Boston, Massachusetts-based security company Rapid7.


Metasploit's Website

Nessus is a proprietary vulnerability scanner developed by Tenable, Inc.


Nessus's Website

Nmap is a network scanner created by Gordon Lyon. Nmap is used to discover hosts and services on a computer network by sending packets and analyzing the responses. Nmap provides a number of features for probing computer networks, including host discovery and service and operating system detection.


Nmap's Website

OpenVAS is the scanner component of Greenbone Vulnerability Manager, a software framework of several services and tools offering vulnerability scanning and vulnerability management. All Greenbone Vulnerability Manager products are free software, and most components are licensed under the GNU General Public License.


OpenVAS's Website

OSForensics™ allows you to search for files many times faster than the search functionality in Windows. Results can be analyzed in the form of a file listing, a Thumbnail View, or a Timeline View which allows you to determine where significant file change activity has occurred. More » Search within Files.


OSForensic's Website

OSSEC is a free, open-source host-based intrusion detection system. It performs log analysis, integrity checking, Windows registry monitoring, rootkit detection, time-based alerting, and active response.


OSSEC's Website

OWASP ZAP is an open-source web application security scanner. It is intended to be used by both those new to application security as well as professional penetration testers. It is one of the most active Open Web Application Security Project projects and has been given Flagship status.


OWASP ZAP's Website

RegRipper is an open source tool, written in Perl, for extracting/parsing information (keys, values, data) from the Registry and presenting it for analysis. RegRipper consists of two basic tools, both of which provide similar capability.


RogRipper's Website

The SIFT Workstation is a collection of free and open-source incident response and forensic tools designed to perform detailed digital forensic examinations in a variety of settings. It can match any current incident response and forensic tool suite.


SANS SIFT's Website

Snort is an open-source, free and lightweight network intrusion detection system (NIDS) software for Linux and Windows to detect emerging threats.


Snort's Website

Suricata is an open-source based intrusion detection system and intrusion prevention system. It was developed by the Open Information Security Foundation. A beta version was released in December 2009, with the first standard release following in July 2010.


Suricata's Website

The Sysinternals Troubleshooting Utilities have been rolled up into a single Suite of tools. This file contains the individual troubleshooting tools and help files.


Sysinternals Suite's Website

tcpdump is a data-network packet analyzer computer program that runs under a command line interface. It allows the user to display TCP/IP and other packets being transmitted or received over a network to which the computer is attached. Distributed under the BSD license, tcpdump is free software.


tcpdump's Website

The Sleuth Kit is a library and collection of Unix- and Windows-based utilities for extracting data from disk drives and other storage so as to facilitate the forensic analysis of computer systems.


The Sleuth Kit's Website

Wireshark is a free and open-source packet analyzer. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education.


Wireshark's Website

Game Development

GameMaker is a series of cross-platform game engines created by Mark Overmars in 1999 and developed by YoYo Games since 2007. The latest iteration of GameMaker released in 2022.


Game Maker Studio's Website

Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies, first announced and released in June 2005 at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference as a Mac OS X game engine. The engine has since been gradually extended to support a variety of desktop, mobile, console and virtual reality platforms.


Unity's Website

Unreal Engine is a 3D computer graphics game engine developed by Epic Games.


Unreal Engine's Website

Graphic Design

Adobe Creative Cloud is a set of applications and services from Adobe Inc. that gives subscribers access to a collection of software used for graphic design, video editing, web development, photography, along with a set of mobile applications and also some optional cloud services.


Adobe Creative Cloud's Website

Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software tool set used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D-printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and, formerly, video games.


Blender's Website

GIMP is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks. It is not designed to be used for drawing, though some artists and creators have used it for such.


GIMP's Website

Programming

Brackets is a source code editor with a primary focus on web development. Created by Adobe Inc., it is free and open-source software licensed under the MIT License, and is currently maintained on GitHub by open-source developers. It is written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS.


Bracket's Website

The Java Development Kit is a distribution of Java Technology by Oracle Corporation. It implements the Java Language Specification and the Java Virtual Machine Specification and provides the Standard Edition of the Java Application Programming Interface.


JAVA Developer Kit's Website

jGRASP is a development environment that includes the automatic creation of software visualizations. It produces static visualizations of source code structure and visualizations of data structures at runtime.


jGRASP's Website

MIT App Inventor is a web application integrated development environment originally provided by Google, and now maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


MIT App Inventor's Website

Notepad++ is a text and source code editor for use with Microsoft Windows. It supports tabbed editing, which allows working with multiple open files in a single window. The product's name comes from the C postfix increment operator. Notepad++ is distributed as free software.


Notepad++'s Website

The most comprehensive IDE for .NET and C++ developers on Windows. Fully packed with a sweet array of tools and features to elevate and enhance every stage of software development.


Visual Studio 2022's Website

A standalone source code editor that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The top pick for JavaScript and web developers, with extensions to support just about any programming language.


Visual Studio Code's Website

XAMPP is a free and open-source cross-platform web server solution stack package developed by Apache Friends, consisting mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MariaDB database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages.


XAMPP's Website

Utility

7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own archive format called 7z, but can read and write several others.


7-Zip's Website

CCleaner, developed by Piriform Software, is a utility used to clean potentially unwanted files and invalid Windows Registry entries from a computer. It is one of the longest-established system cleaners, first launched in 2004.


CCleaner's Website

LibreOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation. It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice.


LibreOffice's Website

PuTTY is a free and open-source terminal emulator, serial console and network file transfer application. It supports several network protocols, including SCP, SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw socket connection. It can also connect to a serial port. The name "PuTTY" has no official meaning.


PuTTY's Website

7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own archive format called 7z, but can read and write several others.


SSH Secure File Transfer Download