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

Metasploit with BackTrack 5 – the ultimate combination


BackTrack is the most popular operating system for security professionals for two reasons. Firstly, it has all the popular penetration testing tools pre-installed in it so it reduces the cost of a separate installation. Secondly, it is a Linux-based operating system which makes it less prone to virus attacks and provides more stability during penetration testing. It saves your time from installing relevant components and tools and who knows when you may encounter an unknown error during the installation process.

Getting ready

Either you can have a separate installation of BackTrack on your hard disk or you can also use it over a host on a virtual machine. The installation process is simple and the same as installing any Linux-based operating system.

How to do it...

  1. On booting the BackTrack OS, you will be asked to enter the username and password. The default username for the root user is root and the password is toor.

  2. On successful login, you can either work over the command line or enter startx to enter in the GUI mode.

  3. You can either start the Metasploit framework from the Applications menu or from the command line. To launch Metasploit from the Applications menu go to Applications | BackTrack | Exploitation Tools | Network Exploitation Tools | Metasploit Framework, as shown in the following screenshot:

  4. Metasploit follows a simple directory structure hierarchy where the root folder is pentest. The directory further branches to /exploits/framework3. To launch Metasploit from the command line, launch the terminal and enter the following command to move to the Metasploit directory:

root@bt:~# cd /pentest/exploits/framework3
root@bt:/pentest/exploits/framework3 ~# ./msfconsole

How it works...

Launching Metasploit from the command line will follow the complete path to msfconsole. Launching it from the Application menu will provide us a direct access to different UIs available to us.