Hashcat vs. PortSwigger Burp Suite

Any time you want to perform offline password cracking exercises, Hashcat is going to be able to do that for you. I can't think of any scenario where you have a password hash you need to crack where another tool would be more suited to the task. Hashcat, of course, works best when you have a GPU available, but you can even use it on a VM if you use the --force flag.

Incentivized

Burp Suite is a good general tool to test websites as long as your website is not too large or you have the time for it to complete. We have some websites that only about five to ten minutes for Burp Suite to complete an attack and a spider only takes about two minutes. Other websites have taken a few hours to complete. I have seen a tester actually run Burp Suite against one of our websites and it took all day to complete.

Incentivized

• GPU accelerated password cracking
• Rule based attacks
• Supports all the hash formats

Incentivized

• The passive scan feature is really awesome, it kind of covers areas that you might miss.
• The CSRF POC is really helpful to my team. It helps development team see the issue and understand it.
• Burp intruder and repeater are the features I myself and my team uses the most as it helps us use our payloads in a variety of different ways.
• Active scan helps the team to ensure coverage for the whole application.

• When drivers for your GPU aren't working it can be very frustrating to get started
• Some 3rd party GUI exists for Hashcat, but having an official one could be nice

Incentivized

• The interface is a big problem: No matter how many features a software provides you, if the features are not well presented, you will miss most of them when they are actually required. The presentation of the software should be improvised and made more presentable.
• Tutorial videos for beginners: This software lacks a lot in tutorials. A beginner almost wastes most of the time in finding and understanding the features and the implementation of the same. The software vendor should work on providing more in-depth videos so that people can learn and understand the concepts.

Incentivized

The workflow between features like Proxy, Scanner, Intruder, and Repeater feels seamless, making it easy to intercept, manipulate, and analyze web traffic. Despite its advanced capabilities, the tool remains accessible and flexible, which significantly speeds up testing without overwhelming the user.

Incentivized

BurpSuite does not have an amazing customer support. All the major help that you will find is from public forums and Google. Although you will find all the required information on Google, still at time professional support helps you solve the problem in much less time and make your operations go smoothly.

Incentivized

Each tool is specific and are good for what they do. While Burp Suite can perform some level of the same functions, somehow security consultants prefer these tools as additional to the Burp Suite. Maybe due to open source and easy setup when compared to Burp Suite. But Burp Suite allows for one tool for many templates for each project.

Incentivized

• Hashcat is a free tool
• It can be used to test password policies
• Great tool for penetration testers doing offline password attacks

Incentivized

• Scanned 100% of the orgs public facing web sites with a small team of analysts.
• Provided a reputable second opinion source to back up the other product in use i.e. Webinspect.
• Pro version $350 is amazing ROI, considering the thwarted attacks and that it's competition is priced in the tens of thousands last I checked.
• No successful hacks. Q.E.D. :-)

Incentivized