Book Image

The Complete Metasploit Guide

By : Sagar Rahalkar, Nipun Jaswal
Book Image

The Complete Metasploit Guide

By: Sagar Rahalkar, Nipun Jaswal

Overview of this book

Most businesses today are driven by their IT infrastructure, and the tiniest crack in this IT network can bring down the entire business. Metasploit is a pentesting network that can validate your system by performing elaborate penetration tests using the Metasploit Framework to secure your infrastructure. This Learning Path introduces you to the basic functionalities and applications of Metasploit. Throughout this book, you’ll learn different techniques for programming Metasploit modules to validate services such as databases, fingerprinting, and scanning. You’ll get to grips with post exploitation and write quick scripts to gather information from exploited systems. As you progress, you’ll delve into real-world scenarios where performing penetration tests are a challenge. With the help of these case studies, you’ll explore client-side attacks using Metasploit and a variety of scripts built on the Metasploit Framework. By the end of this Learning Path, you’ll have the skills required to identify system vulnerabilities by using thorough testing. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: Metasploit for Beginners by Sagar Rahalkar Mastering Metasploit - Third Edition by Nipun Jaswal
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Title Page

Vulnerability assessment versus penetration testing

Vulnerability assessment and penetration testing are two of the most common words that are often used interchangeably. However, it is important to understand the difference between the two. To understand the exact difference, let's consider a real-world scenario:

A thief intends to rob a house. To proceed with his robbery plan, he decides to recon his robbery target. He visits the house (that he intends to rob) casually and tries to gauge what security measures are in place. He notices that there is a window at the backside of the house that is often open, and it's easy to break in. In our terms, the thief just performed a vulnerability assessment. Now, after a few days, the thief actually went to the house again and entered the house through the backside window that he had discovered earlier during his recon phase. In this case, the thief performed an actual penetration into his target house with the intent of robbery.

This is exactly what we can relate to in the case of computing systems and networks. One can first perform a vulnerability assessment of the target in order to assess overall weaknesses in the system and then later perform a planned penetration test to practically check whether the target is vulnerable or not. Without performing a vulnerability assessment, it will not be possible to plan and execute the actual penetration.

While most vulnerability assessments are non-invasive in nature, the penetration test could cause damage to the target if not done in a controlled manner. Depending on the specific compliance needs, some organizations choose to perform only a vulnerability assessment, while others go ahead and perform a penetration test as well.