Book Image

Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook

By : Abhinav Singh
Book Image

Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook

By: Abhinav Singh

Overview of this book

Metasploit® software helps security and IT professionals identify security issues, verify vulnerability mitigations, and manage expert-driven security assessments. Capabilities include smart exploitation, password auditing, web application scanning, and social engineering. Teams can collaborate in Metasploit and present their findings in consolidated reports. The goal of the software is to provide a clear understanding of the critical vulnerabilities in any environment and to manage those risks.Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook targets both professionals and beginners to the framework. The chapters of the book are logically arranged with an increasing level of complexity and cover Metasploit aspects ranging from pre-exploitation to the post-exploitation phase thoroughly. The recipe structure of the book provides a good mix of both theoretical understanding and practical implementation. This book will help readers in thinking from a hacker's perspective to dig out the flaws in target networks and also to leverage the powers of Metasploit to compromise them. It will take your penetration skills to the next level.The book starts with the basics such as gathering information about your target and gradually covers advanced topics like building your own framework scripts and modules. The book goes deep into operating systems-based penetration testing techniques and moves ahead with client-based exploitation methodologies. In the post- exploitation phase, it covers meterpreter, antivirus bypass, ruby wonders, exploit building, porting exploits to framework, and third party tools like armitage, and SET. Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook is the required guide to penetration testing and exploitation.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Setting up Metasploit on a virtual machine with SSH connectivity


In the previous recipe, we focused on setting up a penetration testing lab on a single machine with the help of virtualization. But there can be serious memory usage concerns while using multiple virtual machines. So, here we will discuss a conservation technique which can be really handy in bad times.

Getting ready

All we need is an SSH client. We will use PuTTY as it is the most popular and free SSH client available for Windows. We will set up an SSH connectivity with the Backtrack machine as it has more memory consumption than the Windows XP machine.

How to do it...

  1. We will start by booting our BackTrack virtual machine. On reaching the login prompt, enter the credentials to start the command line. Now don't start the GUI. Execute any one of the following commands:

    root@bt:~# /etc/init.d/start ssh
    root@bt:~# start ssh
    

    This will start the SSH process on the BackTrack machine.

  2. Now find the IP address of the machine by entering the following command:

    root@bt:~# ifconfig

    Note down this IP address.

  3. Now start PuTTY on the host operating system. Enter the IP address of the BackTrack virtual machine and enter port 22:

  4. Now click on Open to launch the command line. If the connection is successful, you will see the PuTTY command line functioning on behalf of the BackTrack machine. It will ask you to log in. Enter the credentials and enter ifconfig to check if the IP is the same as that of the virtual BackTrack:

How it works...

In this SSH session we can now interact with the BackTrack virtual machine using PuTTY. As the GUI is not loaded, it reduces the memory consumption by almost half. Also minimizing the BackTrack virtual machine will further reduce memory consumption as the Windows operating system provides less memory share to the processes that are minimized and provides faster execution of those tasks that are running in maximized mode. This will further reduce the memory consumption to some extent.