Software Alternatives & Reviews

Cobalt Strike VS Shodan

Compare Cobalt Strike VS Shodan and see what are their differences

Cobalt Strike logo Cobalt Strike

Advanced threat tactics for penetration testers.

Shodan logo Shodan

Shodan is the world's first search engine for Internet-connected devices.
  • Cobalt Strike Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-22
  • Shodan Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-16

Cobalt Strike videos

Review: Cobalt Strike Penetration Testing Software

More videos:

  • Review - Boker Magnum Cobalt Strike assisted opening knife
  • Review - Red Team Ops with Cobalt Strike (2 of 9): Infrastructure
  • Demo - <script>alert'1)</script>

Shodan videos

Searching the Internet with Shodan (Seen in Mr. Robot)

More videos:

  • Review - Bestech Shodan Unboxing &amp; First Impressions
  • Review - Bestech Shodan FULL Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Cobalt Strike and Shodan)
Security
29 29%
71% 71
Web Application Security
32 32%
68% 68
Monitoring Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Attack Surface Management

User comments

Share your experience with using Cobalt Strike and Shodan. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Shodan seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 92 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Cobalt Strike mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Cobalt Strike yet. Tracking of Cobalt Strike recommendations started around Mar 2021.

Shodan mentions (92)

  • Introducing OSINT Template Engine: An open source OSINT Tool.
    Transform OSINT sources such as shodan, bgpview & urlscan into templates which you can use to query & store any and each of the API endpoints they provide. Source: 10 months ago
  • Some outgoing ports (e.g, port 22) are blocked
    I'm a little surprised you're asking this but as you don't know - if you set the rulebase correctly, you won't get hammered by "public". A lot of people (of course not people here) don't do that which is why shodan.io is full of servers with SSH exposed to the world. Source: 10 months ago
  • Does anyone want to vet this job opportunity?
    Eh, request a full demo before signing anything. If they make you buy before you can try, move on. Just be advised that data they collect from your site may be used in a database that puts a target on your back. Similar to how shodan.io works. I would probe them on how they handle customer data and if data is shared, partitioned, or isolated to ensure safety from a platform leak. They want to be a security... Source: 10 months ago
  • Security issue or coincidence?
    My network is being hit by China and Russia many times per hour. Make sure your firewall is up-to-date and not have any services available on the Internet (WAN). Look at shodan.io which shows you _everything_ is searched on the Internet. Source: 10 months ago
  • Onion sites crawling: Weird mass "HTTP/1.1 200 " HTTP status line returning?
    In the cases of nginx or apache, I suspect they may be acting as proxies to some backend that also chooses not to send a reason phrase back. Searching for "Reason Phrase" yields a number of bug reports/frameworks that may omit it, and shodan.io shows apache tomcat and a few other services/software that omit the code as well. Source: 11 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Cobalt Strike and Shodan, you can also consider the following products

Exploit Pack - Exploit Pack is an open source project security that will help you adapt exploit codes on-the-fly.

Acunetix - Audit your website security and web applications for SQL injection, Cross site scripting and other...

ZoomEye - Network mapping service

Nessus - Nessus Professional is a security platform designed for businesses who want to protect the security of themselves, their clients, and their customers.

Armitage - Armitage makes penetration testing easy by adding a GUI to the Metasploit framework

Censys - Censys helps organizations, individuals, and researchers find and monitor every server on the Internet to reduce exposure and improve security.