I tried over 500+ tools, these 13 should genuinely be illegal.

I tried over 500+ tools, these 13 should genuinely be illegal. Tools that map a company's entire network in minutes, bypass two-factor authentication on most websites, find every exposed webcam on earth, and one tool that turns a single phone number into someone's complete digital identity. We're going to walk through them the way an actual attack unfolds. Find the target, map their weaknesses, break in, own the network. Quick disclaimer, this is for educational purposes and ethical authorized hacking. Unauthorized use is a federal crime. Let's start with a tool that proves the internet you live on isn't private at all. Shodan. Most people think Google is the biggest search engine on the internet. Google indexes websites, Shodan indexes devices. Every router, every webcam, every smart fridge, every hospital MRI machine, every industrial control system, every traffic light controller, every water treatment plant someone forgot was connected to the internet. Open it right now and type webcam. You'll get thousands of live webcam feeds worldwide. Living rooms, parking lots, factory floors, all accessible because the owner never changed the default password. Type default password and you find devices still using the credentials they shipped with. Type log4shell and you find every server still vulnerable to one of the worst exploits of the last decade, years after the patch was released. A serious operator can map an organization's exposed assets in about 10 minutes, and the second they do, that organization has lost the first move in any future attack. You found something interesting on Shodan, now you want to know everything about the people behind it. That's where this next one lives. Maltego. You start with one piece of information, an email address. That's it, a single email. You drop it into Maltego, click a button and watch a spider's web of dots start drawing itself across the screen. The email connects to a Twitter account, the Twitter to a personal website, the website lists a phone number, the phone number connects to two more email addresses. Each new dot finds more dots. Family members appear, business partners, old usernames from accounts created a decade ago, physical addresses. Within 10 minutes that single email has become a complete map of someone's life. Investigators use Maltego, law enforcement uses Maltego, journalists use it to investigate corruption, and stalkers use it to map their targets. The tool doesn't care about intent, it just connects dots that humans never thought were connectable. Maltego is powerful but it needs a human driving it, which brings us to the tool that removes the human entirely. Spiderfoot. Give Spiderfoot an email, a name, a domain or a phone number, then walk away. The tool runs over 200 separate investigations in parallel. It queries breach databases, it scrapes social media platforms, it pulls public records, it searches dark web indexes, it scans certificate transparency logs, it reverse searches images. When you come back, sometimes in just a few minutes, you have a complete dossier on the target. Every account they've ever had, every breach they've appeared in, every associate they've publicly linked to, every business they've been part of, every physical trace they've left online, all cross-referenced, all visualized. The reason this should be illegal isn't that Spiderfoot exists, it's that it democratized capabilities that previously required a team of analysts and a budget. A teenager with a laptop now runs investigations that 10 years ago would have taken a private investigator three weeks of paid work. Then there's the tool that answers one specific question in five seconds that almost nobody realizes can be answered at all. Sherlock. What if I had your username? That's the entire premise. You type in a username and Sherlock checks over 400 websites in parallel to find every account using that name. Reddit, old forums, gaming platforms, photography sites, dating apps you forgot you signed up for, crypto sites, whatever you registered for in 2015 and never deleted. Most people reuse usernames. They use the same handle for their professional accounts and their teenage forum posts. They use the same handle for their LinkedIn and the comment they left on a controversial YouTube video eight years ago. Sherlock surfaces all of it in seconds for free. The reason it should be illegal is that almost nobody knows their teenage internet history is still indexed under the same name they use professionally today. If usernames feel uncomfortable, the same idea applied to phone numbers is worse. PhoneInfoga. A phone number is the one piece of information almost everyone freely shares. You give it to companies, you list it on resumes, you text it to people you just met. PhoneInfoga turns that single number into a complete identity. Drop in any phone number and the tool returns the carrier, the rough location, every social media account registered to that number, business records connected to it, and any data breaches the number has appeared in. For OSINT professionals this is invaluable. For stalkers, this is the worst possible tool. The defense isn't technical, it's discipline. Use a secondary number for anything that doesn't need your real one. Once a phone number is tied to your real identity online, it's permanent. One of the most powerful recon tool is the one that connects everything. Recon-ng. Think of it as Photoshop for investigation. The other tools each do one thing well, Recon-ng lets you chain them all into one continuous workflow. You start with a single piece of information, you run a module that finds related data, you feed that new data into the next module. The system keeps a complete database of everything it discovers. By the time you finish, you have a structured intelligence package that would have taken a human investigator weeks to assemble manually. The reason it should be illegal is that it turns disorganized people research into industrial grade intelligence gathering for free with no oversight by anyone who wants to run it. This is opening your eyes, hit the like button, drop a comment with which recon tool you didn't know existed. Now we shift from finding the target to finding every weakness they have. The first one makes companies look exactly as exposed as they actually are. BBOT. One word matters here, recursive. You feed BBOT a single company domain, it finds every subdomain that domain has, then it takes each of those subdomains and finds their subdomains, then it does it again. The tool keeps spreading outward until it has mapped the entire external footprint of the organization. A medium-sized company might think it has a thousand subdomains, BBOT often finds 2,000. The other thousand are the ones the company forgot about. Old staging servers from 2019, internal tools that were supposed to stay behind the firewall but were accidentally exposed, development environments still running the original software with no updates. The thousand subdomains the company knows about are probably secure, the thousand it doesn't know about become the breach that makes the news six months later. Everything BBOT does for the internet, the same logic applies to the cloud. CloudFox. A specialized tool designed to automate cloud infrastructure security audits. Everything is moving to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. The problem is that cloud security is so complex even cloud professionals struggle to fully audit it. AWS alone has thousands of services, each with its own permissions model, all interconnected in ways nobody fully understands. CloudFox automates the audit. Hand it cloud credentials and within minutes it has mapped every privilege escalation path in the environment. This account has access to that bucket, which contains credentials for that database, which gives access to that admin account. CloudFox doesn't just list problems, it traces the entire attack chain from where you are to where the keys to everything live. The cloud equivalent of having Google Maps for an attack you haven't started yet. Almost every major ransomware attack of the last two years has involved cloud privilege escalation. CloudFox automates the exact reconnaissance that makes those attacks possible. Quick note before we keep going, every tool I've shown so far is legal to own. The line between legal use and federal crime is whether you have permission to test the target. Owning a hammer is legal, hitting someone with it is not. Now we get to the tools that turn mapped weaknesses into actual access. You might be thinking these tools are aimed at corporations, they're not. They're aimed at anyone whose data is online. That includes you. Most companies treat two-factor authentication as their last line of defense. The next one makes that promise meaningless. Evilginx3. A sophisticated tool built to bypass even the strongest two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication is supposed to protect you, even if your password leaks, the second factor stops the attacker. Evilginx3 was built to defeat exactly that protection. Here's how the attack actually plays out. You get an email that looks completely normal, you click the link, the site that loads looks exactly like the real Microsoft login page because behind the scenes it's secretly forwarding everything you type to the real Microsoft. You enter your email, you enter your password, real Microsoft accepts both and sends a two-factor prompt to your phone. You approve it because you think you're logging in normally. Real Microsoft sends back the session cookie that proves you're logged in. Evilginx catches that cookie as it passes through the fake site. The attacker now has a fully authenticated session for your account. They can log in from anywhere, bypass two-factor entirely, access everything until the session expires. This is the tool behind a large share of modern enterprise breaches. The defense is passkeys or hardware security keys, which cryptographically tie your login to the real Microsoft domain and refuse to authenticate to anything else. If Evilginx attacks the people, this next one attacks the websites themselves. Caido. The next generation of web application security testing. For 15 years the dominant tool for hacking web applications has been Burp Suite. Caido is the first credible challenger. Both tools do the same thing, they sit invisibly between your browser and any website, capturing every request you send and every response you get back. You can modify any request before it leaves, you can replay them, you can automate attacks, you can bypass restrictions the website tried to enforce in your browser. This is how almost every modern web application gets tested or attacked. Caido is faster, has a cleaner interface and lets multiple testers work on the same target in real time. If you're starting web hacking today, Caido is the modern choice and every login page, checkout form and API is testable with this tool, including the ones you use every day. Stay secure, which brings us to the tool that doesn't hack one thing, it hacks everything all at once. The tool that hacks everything is Nuclei. A new vulnerability gets disclosed publicly on a Tuesday morning, by Tuesday evening someone has written a Nuclei template for it and uploaded it to GitHub. By Wednesday morning attackers running Nuclei are scanning the entire internet for every unpatched system. By Wednesday afternoon the exploitation has already started. This window between disclosure and patching used to be weeks, Nuclei made it hours. The tool can scan tens of thousands of targets per hour. Every CVE template lets it check for one specific vulnerability. The library now holds over 9,000 templates covering every known weakness, misconfiguration and exposed service. Whoever patches first wins, everyone else gets compromised. The internet is now a real-time race between attackers running Nuclei and defenders trying to keep up. This next one is the tool that scares enterprise security teams more than almost anything else on this list. That next tool is Bloodhound. Picture a Fortune 500 corporate network, tens of thousands of users, thousands of computers, hundreds of permission groups, a structure built up over decades where nobody fully understands who has access to what. Bloodhound ingests all of that, builds a graph and runs a query called shortest path to domain admin. In under a minute Bloodhound returns the exact path from any low-privilege employee account to total control of the company. Sometimes one hop, sometimes five. A penetration tester who lands on a normal user account can with Bloodhound identify the path to controlling the entire company in a single working session. The same tool security teams should be using defensively is what ransomware groups now run as the first step after they break in. The Conti group ran it, the REvil group ran it, LockBit runs it now. It's the first tool that touches a compromised network after the initial breach. The last one is the tool nobody talks about but every professional has bookmarked. That final tool is CyberChef. After a successful attack you walk away with raw data, encoded passwords, base64 strings, encrypted files, captured network traffic. You need to turn that mess into usable intelligence. CyberChef does it in a browser. You drag operations into a recipe like Lego blocks. Decode base64, extract from a zip, decrypt AES, parse a packet capture, chain them together visually and watch the data transform in real time. The classic example, you exfiltrate a file from a hacked server, it's base64 encoded inside an encrypted zip, inside a custom encoding the company built. CyberChef chains those operations together and you see the result in 30 seconds. What used to take an hour of manual scripting takes one drag and drop in a browser. The tool was built by GCHQ, the British Signals Intelligence Agency and published as open source because every analyst on earth needed exactly this.