The Metasploit project is a tool that is used for penetration testing, as well as IDS signature capturing. Under this project comes the Metasploit Framework subproject, which is open source and free to use. It has the ability to develop and execute exploit codes against a target. Metasploit was originally created by H.D Moore in 2003 and was acquired by Rapid7 in 2009. Metasploit Framework is one of the most widely used tools of the decade. Whether you're performing proper reconnaissance to post-exploitation in the network, almost all penetration tests use Metasploit.
In this chapter, we will start with an introduction to Metasploit Framework and look at its terminology. Then, we will install and set up Metasploit on different platforms so that we can learn how to interact with Metasploit Framework using some basic commands.
We will cover the following...