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 the database in Metasploit


An important feature of Metasploit is the presence of databases which you can use to store your penetration testing results. Any penetration test consists of lots of information and can run for several days so it becomes essential to store the intermediate results and findings. So a good penetration testing tool should have proper database integration to store the results quickly and efficiently.

Getting ready

Metasploit comes with PostgreSQL as the default database. For the BackTrack machine, we have one more option—MySQL. You can use either of the two databases. Let us first check out the default settings of the PostgreSQL database. We will have to navigate to database.yml located under opt/framework3/config. To do this, run the following command:

root@bt:~# cd /opt/framework3/config
root@bt:/opt/framework3/config# cat database.yml
production:
adapter: postgresql
database: msf3
username: msf3
password: 8b826ac0
host: 127.0.0.1
port: 7175
pool: 75
timeout: 5

Notice the default username, password, and default database that has been created. Note down these values as they will be required further. You can also change these values according to your choice as well.

How to do it...

Now our job is to connect the database and start using it. Let us launch the msfconsole and see how we can set up the databases and store our results.

Let us first check the available database drivers.

msf > db_driver
[*]Active Driver: postgresql
[*]Available: postgresql, mysql

PostgreSQL is set as the default database. If you want to change the database driver then you can execute the following command:

Msf> db_driver mysql
[*]Active Driver: Mysql

This will change the active driver to MySQL. In this book, we will primarily be using PostgreSQL for demonstrations.

Note

Rapid7 has dropped the support for MySQL database in the recent versions of Metasploit so the db_driver command may not work. The only default driver supported with the framework in that case will be PostgreSQL.

How it works...

To connect the driver to msfconsle we will be using the db_connect command. This command will be executed using the following syntax:

db_connect username:password@hostIP:port number/database_name

Here we will use the same default values of username, password, database name, and port number which we just noted down from the database.yml file:

msf > db_connect msf3:[email protected]:7175/msf3

On successful execution of the command, our database is fully configured.

There's more...

Let us discuss some more important facts related to setting up the database.

Getting an error while connecting the database

There are chances of an error while trying to establish the connection. There are two things to keep in mind if any error arises:

  • Check the db_driver and db_connect commands and make sure that you are using the correct combination of the database.

  • Use start/etc/init.d to start the database service and then try connecting it.

If the error still prevails then we can re-install the database and associated libraries using the following commands:

msf> gem install postgres
msf> apt-get install libpq-dev

Deleting the database

At any time, you can drop the database created and start again to store fresh results. The following command can be executed for deleting the database:

msf> db_destroy msf3:[email protected]:7175/msf3
Database "msf3" dropped.
msf>