Each day, organizations deal with a great amount of data. If this data ever falls into the wrong hands, it may put your employees, clients, shareholders, and your entire business at risk.
Many organizations operate in healthcare, justice, banking, and education sectors. If hackers manage to access data in any of these sectors, the consequences may go well beyond money loss or bankruptcy; they might put a person’s entire life and reputation at risk. What’s worse, the attacks usually target thousands of people at once. This means that the effects might be devastating not just for one but for thousands of people.
The good news is that the average global costs of data breaches decreased by 9% compared to the previous year; they dropped from USD 4.88 million to USD 4.44 million. This drop was thanks to AI-powered defenses and network security tools.
What Do Network Security Tools Do?
Network security tools come with several functions and benefits. They:
- Stop hackers from accessing your organization’s data.
- Prevent different attacks on your network.
- Help meet industry standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS). This can help avoid expensive fines.
- Boost trust among your existing and potential customers and investors.
- Help reach higher ROI and achieve more successful marketing campaigns (as people actually trust your emails because they know you have strong security mechanisms in place).
6 Best Network Security Tools Reviewed
Here are some reliable network security tools you can use to protect your online presence.
Windscribe
Windscribe, a cybersecurity company, helps users protect their online privacy. While keeping your personal data private, it hides IP addresses, blocks ads, ensuring a more secure online experience.
Windscribe’s security features are designed to prevent data interception, particularly on insecure networks like public Wi-Fi. The service identifies its primary security components as AES-256 encryption, a firewall to prevent all forms of data leaks, and network-level ad and tracker blocking.
The browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge contain tools that automatically rotate the browser’s user agent and can spoof the reported timezone, language, and GPS location to combat tracking.
Highlights:
- Named “The Firewall That Killed the Killswitch,” Windscribe’s firewall is designed to block all internet connectivity that is not actively routed through the VPN tunnel.
- Uses the AES-256 cipher for data encryption and provides a selection of 6 connection protocols for the user to choose from, including WireGuard®, IKEv2, and OpenVPN, which can be used over various ports.
- Routes a user’s connection traffic through two separate servers on the Windscribe network sequentially, rather than the standard single server hop.
- Allows users to create rules to block DNS requests to domains associated with ads, trackers, and malware.
- Includes connection modes described as “stealth features” which are designed to bypass deep packet inspection (DPI) and other forms of internet censorship used to detect and block VPN traffic.
- Allows the user to select specific applications and websites to either include or exclude from the VPN tunnel.
Tenable Nessus
Nessus Professional is a respected vulnerability assessment tool. It is used to identify and manage security weaknesses across an organization’s IT landscape. It helps scan networks, servers, operating systems, and applications for thousands of known vulnerabilities. This may include software bugs and misconfigurations. The platform provides detailed insights and helps security tools remediate important security issues before they can be exploited.
Highlights:
- Automates assessments across different operating systems, devices, and applications.
- Provides IT vulnerability assessments without limits.
- Enables you to see which flaws are most urgent to fix with the help of vulnerability scoring (using CVSS v4, EPSS, and VPR (for Top 10 Vulns)).
- Offers optional advanced support and on-demand training available (in addition to community support).
- Offers actionable advice that both beginners and experts can follow to solve the security gaps.
- Gives configurable reports along with compliance and security audits.
- Provides web application scans, external attack surface scans, and cloud infrastructure scans for the Nessus Expert users.
Splunk
Splunk is a great platform for monitoring, searching, and analyzing machine-generated big data. This has made Splunk a leader in the Security Information and Event Management space. It collects and indexes log data from network devices, servers, and applications in real-time.
Highlights:
- Can ingest logs, metrics, traces, and events, no matter the source or format.
- Has built-in support for OpenTelemetry, SDKs, and agents.
- Uses AI assistants to accelerate MTTR.
- Detects problems in real time, be it at the level of third-party APIs, the network, or the code itself.
- Correlates information from several monitoring sources into a single dashboard and reduces alert noise by 90% (or more).
- Helps detect and prevent advanced persistent threats.
Snort
Snort is a premier open-source Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). It’s great at performing real-time traffic analysis and packet logging on IP networks. Snort can be configured to detect buffer overflows, port scans, and OS fingerprinting attempts. It not only detects but also generates alerts for security administrators so they can take action before it’s too late.
Highlights
- Monitors, in real time, the traffic that happens in and out of a network. Issues alerts when it notices malicious packets or threats on IP networks.
- Enables network admins to tell regular, safe internet activity apart from unusual or suspicious activity.
- Conducts protocol analysis (quite useful for Transmission Control Protocol/IP stack protocol).
- Can specify the OS platform that’s used by the system accessing the network.
- Can be deployed on Linux, Windows, and all other operating systems.
- It is free of charge and accessible to anyone in need of an IDS or IPS to protect their network (it’s open source, so no restrictions).
Metasploit
Metasploit is the world’s most used penetration testing framework. It provides security professionals with the tools to probe for systemic weaknesses. It doesn’t just scan for vulnerabilities; it helps organizations to exploit these vulnerabilities in a safe environment before hackers themselves do it. It contains a massive database of public exploits and allows testers to simulate real-world attacks against networks, web applications, and servers.
Highlights
- Offers penetration testing software to help organizations use hackers’ weapons against them.
- It is open source, but it does provide commercial support on Metasploit Pro.
Wireshark
Wireshark is yet another open-source network protocol analyzer that gives a view of traffic at a microscopic level. It captures data packets in real-time and presents them in a human-readable format.
Highlights
- Conducts real-time inspection for hundreds of protocols across Windows, Linux, macOS, etc.
- Provides both live data capture and offline analysis from previously captured files.
- Uses intuitive color-coding for packets to help users quickly identify different types of traffic.
Summing Up
Businesses from all over the world make use of at least one (generally many more) network security tools to protect their organization from potential threats. The only challenge is that it’s often hard to choose what would work best for your needs.
Before you choose any of the recommended tools above, make sure you research thoroughly to find the right match. If possible, sign up for free demos to try the tool firsthand by yourself before you make a purchase. It might take you some time, but the research will definitely pay off in the long run.
