Importance of Time Management

by Remez Sasson

What is time management?
It is a set of principles, practices, skills, tools and systems that help you use your time to accomplish what you want.

Why is time management important?

Time management is important for your personal life and career success. It teaches you how to manage your time effectively and make the most of it.

Here are a few of the reasons why it is so important, and how it can help you use and manage your time more advantageously:

1. Time is a special resource that you cannot store or save for later use. Everyone has the exact same amount of time each day. Time not well used cannot be retrieved.

2. Most people, feel like they have too much to do and not enough time. They blame lack of time for their poor finances, stress, bad relationships, and for not exercising their body.

Wise time management can help you find the time for what you desire, and for what you need to do.

3. You need time to get what you want out of life. If you wait for extra time to appear, you might lose the game of life. Through right time management, you can “create” the time you need, and not just wait for it to come. By planning your time wisely, you will have more time to do more things.

4. Time management will help you set up your priorities.

5. Time is limited to 24 hours a day, so plan your life wisely.

6. Time management helps you make conscious choices, so you can spend more of your time doing things that are important and valuable to you.

7. You can learn to find the time for the things that are important to you. Even a small amount of time once a day, or even once a week, will take you closer to your goals, and you will be surprised at the progress you make.

8. You become more productive using improved time management skills and tools, and can accomplish more with less effort and time. Time management can help you reduce wasted time and energy, help you become more creative and productive, and enable you to do the right thing at the right time. This will of course lead to more balance and fulfillment in your life.

9. Life today presents so many distractions, and therefore, it is very easy to lose time on unimportant activities. Ask yourself, is watching this or that TV program, reading this or that gossip or participating in a certain activity is going to add anything to your life. Is the time spent on a particular activity well spent, or is just a waste of time and energy?

10. Life puts in front of everyone so many choices each day, and the question is, do you follow what appears on your way, or do you consciously choose what you want to do? Do you allow external distractions to deter you from your goal, or do you use willpower and self discipline to walk toward your goal in a straight line, without wasting time and energy?

11. A certain degree of detachment and inner peace are useful in managing your time effectively. They help you avoid spending too much emotional and mental energy on what people say and think about you. They help you stay calm, despite distractions or difficulties, and this saves you a lot of time and energy, which you can spend on better and more rewarding activities.

There are many things you can do and tools to use to manage your time effectively. There is a lot of time wasted each day, which can be put to better uses. There are changes you can make, which will effectively increase the time you have at your disposal every day.

Thinking, planning, finding out how others manage their time, and reading books and articles on time management, will develop these skills and give you good ideas.

Among the many changes that you can make to manage your time, there is one that is important and easily available, and that is getting up early in the morning. Give up watching TV late at night and go to sleep a little earlier than usual. It will then be easier to wake up earlier.

Even waking up only 15 minutes earlier would be great. It is a time of quietude, before everyone else wakes up, which you can devote to reading, meditating, exercising, or planning your day.

To get rid of the feeling that you have much to do and not enough time, try to feel and to think, as if you have all the time in the world.

This kind of thinking would enable you to focus on what you are doing, without stress and strain.

Always plan your time well and don’t waste it on useless matters. Be careful not to procrastinate, and do everything in the best way you can, with focus and attention.

Don’t have enough time in your day? Do you want to learn how to manage your time? Learning about time management can help you manage your time more efficiently.

Developing some willpower and self-discipline will make it much easier to be in control of your time.

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Will Your City Be Underwater? There’s a Map for That

Interactive

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/will-you-be-underwater-theres-a-map-for-that

There's nothing wrong with Donald Trump

*As individuals criticise Trump's brashness, crude & rude behavior, his ghetto thinking, statements and actions as well as his belligerent public utterings, he's not the problem. The problem is the over 50% of Americans who elected him.

 He is the product of American's way of thinking and there's one thing greatly overlooked, "Many voted for him because they hated Hilary".

 At the end of the day, he represents more than "half" the people you hung out with.

America’s Hidden H.I.V. Epidemic

 Why do America’s black gay and bisexual men have a higher H.I.V. rate than any country in the world?

Early on a balmy morning last October, Cedric Sturdevant began his rounds along the bumpy streets and back roads of Jackson, Miss. Sturdevant, 52, has racked up nearly 300,000 miles driving in loops and widening circles around Jackson in his improvised role of visiting nurse, motivational coach and father figure to a growing number of young gay men and transgender women suffering from H.I.V. and AIDS. Sturdevant is a project coordinator at My Brother’s Keeper, a local social-services nonprofit. If he doesn’t make these rounds, he has learned, many of these patients will not get to the doctor’s appointments, pharmacies, food banks and counseling sessions that can make the difference between life and death.

Negotiating a maze of unpaved roads in Jackson in the company car, a 13-year-old Ford Expedition with cracked seats and chipped paint, he stopped to drop off H.I.V. medication at a couple’s home. One of the men was H.I.V.-positive, the other negative; they lived in the neighborhood locals call the Bottom, where every fifth or sixth home is abandoned, with broken windows, doors hanging off hinges, downed limbs and dry leaves blanketing front yards. Sturdevant banged on the door of a small house, its yard overgrown with weeds; he knew not to leave the package on the doorstep, where it could be stolen. After a while a young man emerged, shirtless, shrugging off sleep. He had just gotten out of jail. Sturdevant handed him the package, shook his hand and told him to “stay out of trouble.”

Sturdevant drove on another 15 minutes to pick up Marq (a shortened version of his name to protect his privacy), a teenager who was still reeling from the H.I.V. diagnosis he received the previous spring. As they headed to and from a doctor’s appointment and a meeting with a counselor, Sturdevant, slow-talking and patient, with eyes that disappear into his cheekbones when he smiles and a snowy beard, gently grilled him, reminding him to stay on his meds. The teenager slumped in the back seat, half listening, half checking his texts. He looked up briefly when Sturdevant told him, “You’ve come a long way. I’m proud of you.” But Marq barely said goodbye as he jumped out of the car in front of a convenience store on an avenue scattered with a pawnshop, a liquor store and several Baptist churches, and he all but admitted he was planning to spend the afternoon smoking weed and looking at Instagram. “Knucklehead,” Sturdevant whispered, as the teenager slammed the door. Pulling off his favorite Dallas Cowboys baseball cap and running a hand over his bald head, Sturdevant added softly, “Breaks my heart.”

These patients of Sturdevant’s are the faces of one of America’s most troubling public-health crises. Thanks to the success of lifesaving antiretroviral medication pioneered 20 years ago and years of research and education, most H.I.V.-positive people today can lead long, healthy lives. In cities like New York and San Francisco, once ground zero for the AIDS epidemic, the virus is no longer a death sentence, and rates of infection have plummeted. In fact, over the past several years, public-health officials have championed the idea that an AIDS-free generation could be within reach — even without a vaccine. But in certain pockets of the country, unknown to most Americans, H.I.V. is still ravaging communities at staggering rates.

Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using the first comprehensive national estimates of lifetime risk of H.I.V. for several key populations, predicted that if current rates continue, one in two African-American gay and bisexual men will be infected with the virus. That compares with a lifetime risk of one in 99 for all Americans and one in 11 for white gay and bisexual men. To offer more perspective: Swaziland, a tiny African nation, has the world’s highest rate of H.I.V., at 28.8 percent of the population. If gay and bisexual African-American men made up a country, its rate would surpass that of this impoverished African nation — and all other nations.

The crisis is most acute in Southern states, which hold 37 percent of the country’s population and as of 2014 accounted for 54 percent of all new H.I.V. diagnoses. The South is also home to 21 of the 25 metropolitan areas with the highest H.I.V. prevalence among gay and bisexual men. Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, the country’s poorest state, is best known for blues, barbecue and “The Help.” It also has the nation’s highest rate — 40 percent — of gay and bisexual men living with H.I.V., followed by Columbia, S.C.; El Paso; Augusta, Ga.; and Baton Rouge, La. In Jackson, a small city of just over 170,000, half a dozen black gay or bisexual men receive the shock of a diagnosis every month, and more than 3,600 people, the majority of them black men, live with the virus.

The South also has the highest numbers of people living with H.I.V. who don’t know they have been infected, which means they are not engaged in lifesaving treatment and care — and are at risk of infecting others. An unconscionable number of them are dying: In 2014, according to a new analysis from Duke University, 2,952 people in the Deep South (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas) died with H.I.V. as an underlying cause, with the highest death rates in Mississippi and Louisiana. Among black men in this region, the H.I.V.-related death rate was seven times as high as that of the United States population at large.

Full article @ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/magazine/americas-hidden-hiv-epidemic.html

Topic Number 420 - Bartering Income

Bartering is the exchange of goods or services. A barter exchange is an organization whose members contract with each other (or with the barter exchange) to exchange property or services. The term doesn't include arrangements that provide solely for the informal exchange of similar services on a noncommercial basis. Usually there's no exchange of cash. An example of bartering is a plumber exchanging plumbing services for the dental services of a dentist.

Information Returns for Bartering Transactions

The Internet has provided a medium for new growth in the bartering industry. This growth prompts the following reminder: Barter exchanges are required to file Form 1099-B.pdf, Proceeds From Broker and Barter Exchange Transactions, for all transactions unless an exception applies. Refer to Bartering in Publication 525, Taxable and Nontaxable Income, and the Form 1099-B Instructions, for additional information on this subject. Persons who don't contract with a barter exchange or who don't barter through a barter exchange but who trade services, aren't required to file Form 1099-B. However, they may be required to file Form 1099-MISC.pdf, Miscellaneous Income. Refer to the Form 1099-MISC Instructions to determine if you have to file this form. If you exchange property or services through a barter exchange, you should receive a Form 1099-B. The IRS also will receive the same information.

Reporting Bartering Income

You must include in gross income in the year of receipt the fair market value of goods or services received from bartering. Generally, you report this income on Form 1040, Schedule C.pdf, Profit or Loss from Business (Sole Proprietorship), or Form 1040, Schedule C-EZ.pdf, Net Profit from Business (Sole Proprietorship). If you failed to report this income, correct your return by filing a Form 1040X.pdf, Amended U.S. Individual Income Tax Return. Refer to Topic No. 308 and Should I File an Amended Return? for information on filing an amended return.

Estimated Tax Payments

If you receive income from bartering, you may be required to make estimated tax payments. Refer to Topic No. 306 and Form 1040-ES.pdf, Estimated Tax for Individuals, for more information.

Additional Information

Refer to Publication 525, Taxable and Nontaxable Income, and our Bartering Tax Center page for more information on bartering income and barter exchanges.

More Tax Topic Categories

I was asked

"I know that I know nothing", Socrates's, "Socratic Paradox".

Socrates said, "All I know is that I know nothing". What I'm trying to figure out is this: if I know NOTHING, how do I KNOW that I know nothing? It just goes round in circles thus becoming nothing more than a paradox. Would you agree?
RESPONSE FROM PETER LIPTON ON NOVEMBER 10, 2005:
I agree that the sentence "All I know is that I know nothing" is paradoxical, or anyway false, since if there is one thing that you know than you can't know that you know nothing since that isn't true. But we can probably avoid the problem by saying instead "All I know is that I know nothing else".

RESPONSE FROM JYL GENTZLER ON NOVEMBER 12, 2005:
Just to set the record straight. Some such claim is often attributed to Socrates on the basis of his remarks in Plato’s Apology (21a-e), but the claim that he actually makes is much less paradoxical. Socrates reports that his friend Chaerephon went to the oracle at Delphi to ask if any person was wiser than Socrates. The oracle apparently answered, no. After having cross-examined lots of people who had a reputation for wisdom and having discovered as a result that their reputation was undeserved, Socrates drew the following conclusion about the significance of the oracle’s answer: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know when I do not know” (Ap. 21d-e).

RESPONSE FROM ALEXANDER GEORGE ON NOVEMBER 12, 2005:
Can we really defend Socrates here though? (Note: It's early Saturday morning and this is relevant to present fearless wading into rough waters.) He says that he is "likely to be wiser" by virtue of not asserting that he knows something worthwhile. But isn't wisdom knowledge? Doesn't being wiser require knowing a little more? If so, then it seems that Socrates really is saying that he knows that he doesn't know anything worthwhile. (That's the knowledge that makes him just a tad wiser.) And now we're back to worrying whether Socrates' assertion is paradoxical.

I can imagine two responses: (A) one might claim that one's failure to know anything worthwhile isn't itself a worthwhile thing to know (and so Socrates' claim to knowledge doesn't clash with what he claims to know, viz. that he knows nothing worthwhile). Or (B) one might hold that one could be wiser simply by failing to claim knowledge that one doesn't have (so we can make sense of Socrates' claim to being slightly wiser without imputing some paradox-threatening knowledge to him).

About (A): but surely what Socrates knows must be worthwhile for that knowledge to make him a little wiser! And about (B): if I'm wise to the degree that I'm failing to claim to know things that are false, then, since there are infinitely many false statements we all fail to claim to know, it's hard to see how anyone's wiser than anyone else.

Time for hasty retreat to shore and coffee.

RESPONSE FROM PETER S. FOSL ON NOVEMBER 12, 2005:
This dimension of Socrates' thought has been, of course, highly influential with skeptics. Indeed, it was in part on the basis of this sort of gesture in Plato's works that the Academic skeptics regarded themselves as inheritors of Platonic philosophy. Later the idea became known as "learned ignorance," for example in Nicholas of Cusa's work by the same name. It's an interesting thing to examine the different ways philosophers have tried to cope with the constellation of ideas involved with coming to understand one's ignorance, as well as other dimensions of human finitude. Hellenistic and Greco-Roman skeptics explored the ways in which doubt my characterize humanity's relationship to knowlegdge and whether skeptical arguments advance any positive wisdom or simply tear things down. Montaigne formulated the now-classic, "What do I know?" Erasmus called himself a "foolospher." Hume explored concepts of "natural," "common," ordinary, and non-dogmatic forms of belief while still acknowledging skeptical doubt. Wittgenstein in On Certainty and elsewhere considered whether it's even meaningful to speak about not knowing or doubting various locutions; and in a related way Stanley Cavell in The Claim of Reason tries to produce an acknowledgment of the way the deepest way human beings relate to the world is not one of knowledge/knowing. Kiekegaard opted for what he called "indirect" discourse. And perhaps that's the best way of understanding Socrates here--not as trying to state a fact or formulate a proposition but instead to point to or show something important about human wisdom.

RESPONSE FROM JYL GENTZLER ON NOVEMBER 13, 2005:
Peter is right. Many have taken the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues to be a skeptic at least with regard to knowledge of the most worthwhile things. My own view is that, at least as he’s represented in the Platonic dialogues, Socrates is not a skeptic. He did not believe that it was impossible to acquire such knowledge. In fact, he devotes his life to acquiring such knowledge. He simply believed that it was very difficult to acquire such knowledge and that no one that he had yet met had done so.

How, then, might he respond to Alex’s worries that his position is paradoxical? He would first have to explain that he could be wiser than someone else without being in a cognitive state that would qualify as knowledge. He would then have to explain that when he speaks of knowledge of worthwhile things, he primarily has in mind knowledge of what things are most worthwhile, that is, what things are the most worthy goals to which we should devote our lives (Ap. 29d-30b). On Socrates’ view, the problem with his fellow Athenians was that they thought that they already knew how they should live their lives. Socrates believed that not only did they have false beliefs about these matters; worse, their belief that they already had knowledge prevented them from being motivated to continue thinking about these matters and eventually getting themselves into a better place. To the extent that he did not believe that he already had knowledge of these important matters, Socrates was one step closer toward achieving knowledge and was thus, to this extent, wiser.

*People that think they have bypassed sensory perceptions and actually know things get on my fucking nerves.

I don't get vexed about angry emails

*At least you're reading and thinking and that's better than 90% of individuals.

FEMA Awards More Than $5 Million For Old Parish Prison Docks

*Could all the bullshit with Donald Trump be an invented distraction?

BATON ROUGE, LA — The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has awarded more than $5 million to the City of New Orleans for the renovations of the Old Parish Prison Docks following Hurricane Katrina. Most of the city’s fire, police and criminal justice facilities were damaged or destroyed in the aftermath of the storm.  The City of New Orleans has been approved for a funding option to facilitate the renovations under the Omnibus Bill Section 546 of the Consolidated Security and Disaster Assistance and Continuing Appropriations Act of 2009, Public Law 110-329.

The $5 million grant for the Criminal Justice and Public Safety project includes funding for the interior demolition and reconfiguration of the existing space at the Old Parish Prison Docks to provide a more efficient and secure means of transporting prisoners from the Old Parish Prison into the Criminal District Court for trial purposes. These renovations include a complete demolition and reworking of the floor to provide more visibility, installation of new heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, life safety and security systems, Americans with Disabilities Act upgrades, and the installation of a new freight elevator.

This grant is funded through FEMA’s Public Assistance grant program which reimburses communities for actions taken in the immediate response and during recovery from a disaster. Eligible applicants include states, federally recognized tribal governments, U.S. territories, local governments, and certain private non-profit organizations. The grant applications are submitted from the state, which coordinates the process with local governments.

FEMA obligates funding directly to the state.  It is the state's responsibility to ensure that the City of New Orleans receives this award. Following the state's review process, and upon receipt of appropriate documentation, they will provide the funds on a reimbursable basis.

FEMA has a long-term commitment to help Louisiana communities recover and to restore critical infrastructure damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Last Updated: 

March 21, 2018 - 11:04

Google Just Discovered A Massive Web Leak... And You Might Want To Change All Your Passwords

A Google researcher has uncovered what may be the most worrying web leak of 2017 so far, possibly exposing passwords, private messages and other sensitive data from a vast number of sites, including major services like Uber, FitBit and OKCupid.

It's being dubbed CloudBleed by some, as the problem was caused by a vulnerability in code from a hugely popular web company, CloudFlare, and was not dissimilar to the infamous Heartbleed bug of 2015 (though possibly more severe in terms of the potential for data leakage). It's similar to Heartbleed in that CloudFlare, which hosts and serves content for a at least 2 million websites, was returning random chunks of memory from vulnerable servers when requests came in.

Making the issue even more severe was the fact that search engines were caching that leaked information. Another major concern was that CloudFlare typically hosts content from different sites on the same server, so a request to one vulnerable website could reveal information about a separate, unrelated CloudFlare site.

"For example, you could have visited a page on uber.com, and a chunk of memory from a previous request/response to okcupid.com would be returned," explained Pen Test Partners whitehat hacker Andrew Tierney. "This sensitive data could have been returned to anyone. There was no need to carry out an active attack to obtain the data - my mum may have someone else's passwords stored in her browser cache just by visiting another CloudFlare fronted site."

Famous Google bug hunter Tavis Ormandy uncovered the issue, describing it in a brief post, noting that he informed CloudFlare of the problem on February 17. In his own proof-of-concept attack he was able to have the server return encryption keys, passwords and even HTTPS requests of other users from major CloudFlare-hosted sites.

In a later post, he found the issue to be even more severe: "I'm finding private messages from major dating sites, full messages from a well-known chat service, online password manager data, frames from adult video sites, hotel bookings. We're talking full HTTPS requests, client IP addresses, full responses, cookies, passwords, keys, data, everything."

Ormandy wrote that CloudFlare sent him a draft post that "severely downplays the risk to customers," though he didn't say what he thought about the final public notification that went out Thursday. In that post, CloudFlare wrote: "The bug was serious because the leaked memory could contain private information and because it had been cached by search engines. We have also not discovered any evidence of malicious exploits of the bug or other reports of its existence.

"The greatest period of impact was from February 13 and February 18 with around 1 in every 3,300,000 HTTP requests through CloudFlare potentially resulting in memory leakage (that’s about 0.00003 per cent of requests)." It admitted that the earliest date memory could have leaked was September 22 2016. CloudFlare also said one of its own private keys leaked, one for internal machine-to-machine encryption.

A large list of CloudFlare websites has been uploaded to GitHub, though it's not clear just which ones leaked any data (another list found a handful of affected domains). The user who posted the Github list still recommended users of all those sites change their passwords as a precaution. Security entrepreneur Ryan Lackey recommended the same, though noted it was unlikely the average web user's password was in danger of being stolen.

What's the bug?

The problem lay in the way CloudFlare parsed and modified web pages when a user hit the site. When certain data was sent to the server, it would fail to parse the information properly and cough up sections of memory, jumping over the "buffer" designed to keep secret info secure. That memory might have contained sensitive data, like passwords or private communications.

Ormandy found the issue by firing a load of junk data at CloudFlare servers, a process called "fuzzing." In some cases, he received responses that contained information from memory. He could then easily replicate the process to guarantee that sensitive information would be returned.

CloudFlare, Google and other search engine providers have been scouring the web looking for sites that may have leaked information via the CloudBleed bug. They found 161 unique domains where leaked memory had been cached by the search engines, and that data has now been purged. "We also undertook other search expeditions looking for potentially leaked information on sites like Pastebin and did not find anything," CloudFlare added.

Regardless of that cleanup and the continuing efforts of CloudFlare to remove the bug from its customers' servers, Google security researchers like Natalie Silvanovich believe the ultimate impact might be severe.

Full article > https://tinyurl.com/ycakdfch

Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you Dylan Curran

Want to freak yourself out? I’m going to show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it.

Google knows where you’ve been

Google stores your location (if you have location tracking turned on) every time you turn on your phone. You can see a timeline of where you’ve been from the very first day you started using Google on your phone.

Click on this link to see your own data: google.com/maps/timeline?…

Here is every place I have been in the last 12 months in Ireland. You can see the time of day that I was in the location and how long it took me to get to that location from my previous one.

Google knows everything you’ve ever searched – and deleted

Google stores search history across all your devices. That can mean that, even if you delete your search history and phone history on one device, it may still have data saved from other devices.

Click on this link to see your own data: myactivity.google.com/myactivity

Why have we given up our privacy to Facebook and other sites so willingly?

 

Read more

Google has an advertisement profile of you

Google creates an advertisement profile based on your information, including your location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lb in one day?) and income.

Advertisement

Click on this link to see your own data: google.com/settings/ads/

Google knows all the apps you use

Google stores information on every app and extension you use. They know how often you use them, where you use them, and who you use them to interact with. That means they know who you talk to on Facebook, what countries are you speaking with, what time you go to sleep.

Click on this link to see your own data: security.google.com/settings/secur…

Google has all of your YouTube history

Google stores all of your YouTube history, so they probably know whether you’re going to be a parent soon, if you’re a conservative, if you’re a progressive, if you’re Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, if you’re feeling depressed or suicidal, if you’re anorexic …

Click on this link to see your own data: youtube.com/feed/history/s…

The data Google has on you can fill millions of Word documents

Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. I’ve requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents.

This link includes your bookmarks, emails, contacts, your Google Drive files, all of the above information, your YouTube videos, the photos you’ve taken on your phone, the businesses you’ve bought from, the products you’ve bought through Google …

They also have data from your calendar, your Google hangout sessions, your location history, the music you listen to, the Google books you’ve purchased, the Google groups you’re in, the websites you’ve created, the phones you’ve owned, the pages you’ve shared, how many steps you walk in a day …

Click on this link to see your own data: google.com/takeout

Facebook has reams and reams of data on you, too

Facebook offers a similar option to download all your information. Mine was roughly 600MB, which is roughly 400,000 Word documents.

This includes every message you’ve ever sent or been sent, every file you’ve ever sent or been sent, all the contacts in your phone, and all the audio messages you’ve ever sent or been sent.

Click here to see your data: https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467

Full article > https://tinyurl.com/yde6u3ps

10 Best Hacking Tools Of 2018 For Windows, Linux And OS X

10 Best Hacking Tools for Windows, Linux and OS X – 2018 Edition

Technology and hacking, in particular, is a dynamic field with new innovations and tools being released almost every day. If you are a security researcher, pentester or a system admin, you need to have a precise set of tools and apps on your PCs/laptops to find the hidden vulnerabilities and plug them.

We have compiled this list of best hacking tools of 2018 with their description and download links. You can read about them and learn how to use them.

Please note that this article is for educational purpose only and Techworm does not promote any malicious practices. 

1. Nmap (Network Mapper)| Free

Nmap is a well-known free and open source tool for hackers. This software is primarily used for security audits and network discovery. Thousands of system admins all around the world use Nmap for network inventory, check for open ports, manage service upgrade schedules, and monitor host or service uptime. As a tool, it makes use of raw IP packets in ways to determine the hosts available on the network, what services (application name and version) are these hosts providing information about, operating systems, type/version of filters/firewalls, etc.

2. Metasploit Penetration Testing Software| Free & Paid

This is one of the most popular pentesting framework around for exploiting (utilising network weakness for making a “backdoor”) vulnerabilities (Weak Points) on Network. Those unfamiliar with it can consider it as a ‘collection of hacking tools and frameworks’ – useful to carry out a range of tasks. It’s the tool of choice for cyber-security professionals and ethical hackers. Metasploit is basically a computer security project that provides users with information regarding known security vulnerabilities, which can be vital as well as help in creating penetration testing and IDS testing plans, strategies and methodologies for exploitation.

3. OWASP Zed| Free

The Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is now one of the most popular OWASP projects. This hacking and pentesting tool with its easy UI finds vulnerabilities in web applications. ZAP is a popular tool owing to the support it enjoys and thus makes it an excellent choice for those that work in the domain of cyber-security. ZAP provides automated scanners as well as various tools that allow you to discover security vulnerabilities manually. When used as a proxy server it allows the user to manipulate all of the traffic that passes through it, including traffic using https. It can also run in a ‘daemon’ mode which is then controlled via a REST Application programming interface. If one is able to understand and master this tool, it could be advantageous to one’s career as a penetration tester.

4. John The Ripper| Free

This is one of the most popular password cracking pentesting tool that is most commonly used to perform dictionary attacks. John the Ripper takes text string samples (from a text file, referred to as a ‘wordlist’, containing popular and complex words found in a dictionary or real passwords cracked before), encrypting it in the same way as the password being cracked (including both the encryption algorithm and key), and comparing the output to the encrypted string. This tool can also be used to perform a variety of alterations to dictionary attacks including Brute Force and Rainbow attacks.

Usually abbreviated to just Cain – this is highly popular hacking tool that finds many mentions across tutorials. Cain & Abel is a password recovery tool that is mostly used for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of various kind of passwords by sniffing the network (capturing some of the data packets), cracking encrypted passwords using dictionary, brute-force (generation of hashes out of words and then comparison of encrypted hash with the generated one, this method takes less time than dictionary attack method) and cryptanalysis attacks. The program does not exploit any software vulnerabilities or bugs that could not be fixed with little effort. It covers some security aspects/weakness present in protocol’s standards, authentication methods and caching mechanisms.

6. Wireshark| Free

Wireshark is a free and open source packet analyser used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education. In simpler words, it captures data packets in real-time and then displays in a readable format (verbose). The tool (platform) has been highly developed and it includes filters, color-coding and other features that lets the user dig deep into network traffic and inspect individual packets. If you intend to follow pentesting or cyber-security as a career choice, then learning Wireshark is an absolute necessity.

7. Aircrack-ng| Free

For those of you who need to penetrate and audit wireless networks, you’ve just found your new best friend.  The Aircrack suite of Wifi (Wireless) hacking tools are legendary because they are very effectively when used in the right hands. For those new to this wireless-specific hacking program, Aircrack-ng is an 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking hacking tool that can recover keys when sufficient data packets have been captured (in monitor mode). Aircrack-ng implements standard FMS attacks along with some optimizations like KoreK attacks, as well as the PTW attacks to make their attacks more potent.

8. THC Hydra| Free

THC Hydra is hugely popular cracking tool and has a very active and experienced development team. This tool usually works in unison with John the Ripper. Essentially, THC Hydra is a fast and stable Network Login Hacking Tool that will use dictionary or brute-force attacks to try various password and login combinations against an log in page. This hacking tool supports a wide set of protocols including Mail (POP3, IMAP, etc.), Databases, LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), SMB, VNC, and SSH (Secure Shell used by VPN softwares).

9. Maltego| Free & Paid

Although, it is not a complete hacking tool as such, Maltego works within a digital forensics sphere and is quite helpful in data breach incident response. Maltego has been designed as a platform to deliver an overall view of cyber threats to the local working environment of an organization. One of the main reasons for Maltego’s popularity is it’s unique perspective in offering both network and resource based entities to aggregate information available throughout the web.

10. Nikto Website Vulnerability Scanner| Free

Nikto is an open source (GPL) web server scanner that is able to identify and detect vulnerabilities in web servers. The system searches against a database of over 6,800 potentially dangerous files/programs when scanning software stacks. Like other scanners, Nikoto also scans for outdated (unpatched) versions of over 1,300 servers, and version specific problems on over 275 servers. It also checks for server configuration items such as the presence of multiple index files, HTTP server options, and will attempt to identify installed web servers and software. Scan items and plugins are frequently updated and can be automatically updated.

https://www.techworm.net/2018/01/10-best-hacking-tools-2018-windows-linux-os-x.html