Book Image

Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Daniel Teixeira, Abhinav Singh, Nipun Jaswal, Monika Agarwal
Book Image

Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Daniel Teixeira, Abhinav Singh, Nipun Jaswal, Monika Agarwal

Overview of this book

Metasploit is the world's leading penetration testing tool and helps security and IT professionals find, exploit, and validate vulnerabilities. Metasploit allows penetration testing automation, password auditing, web application scanning, social engineering, post exploitation, evidence collection, and reporting. Metasploit's integration with InsightVM (or Nexpose), Nessus, OpenVas, and other vulnerability scanners provides a validation solution that simplifies vulnerability prioritization and remediation reporting. Teams can collaborate in Metasploit and present their findings in consolidated reports. In this book, you will go through great recipes that will allow you to start using Metasploit effectively. With an ever increasing level of complexity, and covering everything from the fundamentals to more advanced features in Metasploit, this book is not just for beginners but also for professionals keen to master this awesome tool. You will begin by building your lab environment, setting up Metasploit, and learning how to perform intelligence gathering, threat modeling, vulnerability analysis, exploitation, and post exploitation—all inside Metasploit. You will learn how to create and customize payloads to evade anti-virus software and bypass an organization's defenses, exploit server vulnerabilities, attack client systems, compromise mobile phones, automate post exploitation, install backdoors, run keyloggers, highjack webcams, port public exploits to the framework, create your own modules, and much more.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Contributors
Packt Upsell
Preface
Index

Introduction


In  Chapter 2, Information Gathering and Scanning, we focused on gathering information about our target, such as the target IP address, open ports, available services, operating system, and so on. One of the biggest assets in the process of information gathering is gaining knowledge about the operating system used by the target server or system. This information can prove to be very helpful in penetrating the target machine, as we can quickly look for exploits and vulnerabilities for the services running on the system. Well, the process is not as straightforward as it sounds, but knowledge about the target operating system and the services it is running can ease our task to a great extent.

Every flavor of an operating system has some bug in it. Once it gets reported, the process of developing exploits for it starts. Licensed operating systems, such as Windows, quickly develop patches for the bug or vulnerability and provide it as an update to its users. Vulnerability disclosure...