Book Image

Metasploit Revealed: Secrets of the Expert Pentester

By : Sagar Rahalkar, Nipun Jaswal
Book Image

Metasploit Revealed: Secrets of the Expert Pentester

By: Sagar Rahalkar, Nipun Jaswal

Overview of this book

Metasploit is a popular penetration testing framework that has one of the largest exploit databases around. This book will show you exactly how to prepare yourself against the attacks you will face every day by simulating real-world possibilities. This learning path will begin by introducing you to Metasploit and its functionalities. You will learn how to set up and configure Metasploit on various platforms to create a virtual test environment. You will also get your hands on various tools and components and get hands-on experience with carrying out client-side attacks. In the next part of this learning path, you’ll develop the ability to perform testing on various services such as SCADA, databases, IoT, mobile, tablets, and many more services. After this training, we jump into real-world sophisticated scenarios where performing penetration tests are a challenge. With real-life case studies, we take you on a journey through client-side attacks using Metasploit and various scripts built on the Metasploit framework. The final instalment of your learning journey will be covered through a bootcamp approach. You will be able to bring together the learning together and speed up and integrate Metasploit with leading industry tools for penetration testing. You’ll finish by working on challenges based on user’s preparation and work towards solving the challenge. The course provides you with highly practical content explaining Metasploit from the following Packt books: 1. Metasploit for Beginners 2. Mastering Metasploit, Second Edition 3. Metasploit Bootcamp
Table of Contents (35 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Module 1
31
Bibliography

Intelligence gathering/reconnaissance phase


In the intelligence-gathering phase, you need to gather as much information as possible about the target network. The target network could be a website, an organization, or might be a full-fledged Fortune 500 company. The most important aspect is to gather information about the target from social media networks and use Google Hacking (a way to extract sensitive information from Google using specialized queries) to find sensitive information related to the target. Footprinting the organization using active and passive attacks can also be an approach.

The intelligence phase is one of the most crucial phases in penetration testing. Properly gained knowledge about the target will help the tester to stimulate appropriate and exact attacks, rather than trying all possible attack mechanisms; it will also help him or her save a large amount of time as well. This phase will consume 40 to 60 percent of the total time of the testing, as gaining access to the...