My Holiday Basket of Favorite Utilities

Regardless of your career as a security researcher, penetration tester, technical writer or sales person, you probably have a few utilities on your computer that are a “must have” for daily operations. Some of them are probably unique to your position like a port scanner and others more generic like a file compression utility. Everyone has their favorites and there is never a shortage of recommendations from your peers. As a product manager, the use cases for my computer vary from building marketing videos, to training materials, all the way to product planning and helping the systems engineers with architecture and technical questions. With that in mind, my standard utilities cover a wide gambit of functions. Since it is now mid-December, and traditionally the holiday season is a time of year for giving, I thought I would share my favorites. Below is my top 5 list of favorite desktop utilities I could hardly do without:

• 1. UltraEdit- UltraEdit is a powerful replacement for Notepad that can handle virtually any file format. It is relatively easy to use and can perform complex searching, edits, and sorting better than any other text editor I have seen.
• 2. TCPView - TCPView is a Windows program that will show you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP connections on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. It is a great way to figure out if applications are leaking data.
• 3. SnipIT – SnipIT is a Microsoft utility that ships with Windows Vista and later. You can use Snipping Tool to capture a screenshot, or snip, of any object on your screen, and then annotate, save, or share the image. It has replaced my paid shareware versions that did similar functions. This is a must have utility for building presentations based on products and other things you see on the screen.
• 4. WinRAR - WinRAR is a powerful compression utility. It can compress and backup anything to RAR or ZIP formats and make it easy to send them via email or automatically break them up into multiple files based on size for DVDs or other removable media.
• 5. Robocopy - Robocopy (Robust File Copy) is a command-line file copying tool. This was originally apart of the NT 4.0 resource kit and still available today for command line syncing and copying entire file and directory structures. In a batch file, it makes a great utility for backing up a “My Documents” directory.

Now you may wonder why I am focusing on this for my blog today? For security engineers, a port scanner and vulnerability assessment solution (and a few others) are pretty much staple utilities. If you’re looking for other tools to add to your toolkit, take a look at we have to offer and make sure you check back frequently. eEye is changing the way security and vulnerability management is done and you will find your toolkit containing more solutions that you can not do business without. Happy Holidays!