Book Image

Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook, Second Edition

By : Monika Agarwal, Abhinav Singh
Book Image

Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook, Second Edition

By: Monika Agarwal, Abhinav Singh

Overview of this book

<p>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.</p> <p>Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook, Second Edition contains chapters that are logically arranged with an increasing level of complexity and thoroughly covers some aspects of Metasploit, ranging from pre-exploitation to the post-exploitation phase. This book is an update from version 4.0 to version 4.5. It covers the detailed penetration testing techniques for different specializations like wireless networks, VOIP systems, and the cloud.</p> <p>Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook, Second Edition covers a number of topics which were not part of the first edition. You will learn how to penetrate an operating system (Windows 8 penetration testing) to the penetration of a wireless network, VoIP network, and then to cloud.</p> <p>The book starts with the basics, such as gathering information about your target, and then develops to cover 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 the framework, and penetration testing, while dealing with VOIP, wireless networks, and cloud computing.</p> <p>This book will help readers to think 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.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Metasploit Penetration Testing CookbookSecond Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Vulnerability scanning with Nessus


So far, we have learned the basics of port scanning, along with the practical implementation with Nmap. Port scanning has been extended to several other tools which further enhance the process of scanning and information gathering. In the next few recipes, we will cover those tools which scan the target for available services and open ports, and then try to determine the type of vulnerability that may exist for that particular service or port. Let us begin our journey to vulnerability scanning.

Nessus is one of the most widely used vulnerability scanners. It scans the target for a range of vulnerabilities and produces a detailed report for it. Nessus is a very helpful tool to use for penetration testing. Either you can use the GUI version of Nessus, or you can use it from the Metasploit console. In this book, we will primarily focus on using Nessus with msfconsole.

Getting ready

To start working with Nessus in msfconsole, we will have to load Nessus and then...