It's indeed CryptoNight. As hardware you need CPU or GPU. with GPU you get good hash rates, but the power cost for GPU mining is almost bigger than the return.
For CPU, if you have newer generation CPU with AES-NI, that's the best way to mine XMR afaik.
As software, if you have indeed AES-NI, I recommend Wolf's version.
There is also Claymore miner, which includes a fee for Claymore and there are other miners too. The
XMR topic has links to them.
I have no AES-NI and I use an older miner which seems to give best results for my CPU. It's a cpuminer-multi -1.0.3
I get on my CPU 60-70 H/s. I have an old i7 920.