The birth of Metasploit dates back to 14 years ago, when H.D Moore, in 2003, wrote a portable network tool using Perl. By 2007, it was rewritten in Ruby. The Metasploit project received a major commercial boost when Rapid7 acquired the project in 2009. Metasploit is essentially a robust and versatile penetration testing framework. It can literally perform all tasks that are involved in a penetration testing life cycle. With the use of Metasploit, you don't really need to reinvent the wheel! You just need to focus on the core objectives; the supporting actions would all be performed through various components and modules of the framework. Also, since it's a complete framework and not just an application, it can be customized and extended as per our requirements.
Metasploit is, no doubt, a very powerful tool for penetration testing. However, it's certainly not a magic wand that can help you hack into any given target system. It's important to understand the capabilities of Metasploit so that it can be leveraged optimally during penetration testing.
While the initial Metasploit project was open source, after the acquisition by Rapid7, commercial grade versions of Metasploit also came into existence. For the scope of this book, we'll be using the Metasploit Framework edition.