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

Introduction to Metasploit

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.

Did you know? The Metasploit Framework has more than 3000 different modules available for exploiting various applications, products, and platforms, and this number is growing on a regular basis.