In the Chapter 4, Executing Credential Attacks with Python, we showed how to identify legitimate accounts on a system or in an environment. Metasploitable is well documented, but the concepts to gain access to the system are identical to real life. Additionally, using exploitable boxes like these provides a fantastic training environment, with little risk to you, as a tester from both an availability perspective and a legal perspective. In the previous chapter, we verified the account msfadmin was present on the target system, and by default in Metasploitable, this account has the same password as the username.

Just like real environments, we research through websites and configuration channels to determine, what the default account and settings are, then use those to intelligently exploit the boxes. To validate these weaknesses, we are going to execute a password spray attack. This attack uses one password for many usernames, which prevents account...