The votes are in, and for 2007, Nmap has been voted by the community over at Linuxquestions.org as the most popular Network Security Application. To some, it may have seemed that Nmap had this award locked up, but this was not the case. Coming in at a hair under 25% of the total vote, it beat out its nearest competitor Wireshark by only 4%, hardly a resounding victory.

What it means is that open source network security applications are getting to a very mature state where the competition is healthy and competitive; it's great to see. In all, there were a total of 12 entrants in to the category including Snort, ClamAV, Nessus and Firestarter among others in this wide-ranging category.

As a side note, many suggestions mentioned the need to create a Firewall Distro Poll, as opposed to just an application poll. Do you think there should be a separate poll? Would your list have included other network security applications?

The complete List:

nmap 24.95%
Wireshark 20.68%
Firestarter 13.01
ClamAV 10.23%
Snort 7.68%
Guarddog 7.04%
tcpdump 4.48%
Shorewall 4.48%
kismet 2.99%
Nessus 2.77%
fwBuilder 1.49%
dsniff 0.21%

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