PENETRATION TESTING USING METASPLOIT
Why Do a Penetration Test?
Companies invest millions of dollars in security programs to protect critical infrastructures, identify chinks in the armor, and prevent serious data breaches. A penetration test is one of the most effective ways to identify systemic weaknesses and deficiencies in these programs. By attempting to circumvent security controls and bypass security mechanisms, a penetration tester is able to identify ways in which a hacker might be able to compromise an organization’s security and damage the organization as a whole. As you read through this book, remember that you’re not necessarily targeting one system or multiple systems. Your goal is to show, in a safe and controlled manner, how an attacker might be able to cause serious harm to an organization and impact its ability to, among other things, generate revenue, maintain its reputation, and protect its customers.
Metasploit isn’t just a tool; it’s an entire framework that provides the infrastructure needed to automate mundane, routine, and complex tasks. This allows you to concentrate on the unique or specialized aspects of penetration testing and on identifying flaws within your information security program. As you progress through the chapters in this book and establish a wellrounded methodology, you will begin to see the many ways in which Metasploit can be used in your penetration tests. Metasploit allows you to easily build attack vectors to augment its exploits, payloads, encoders, and more in order to create and execute more advanced attacks. At various points in this book we explain several third-party tools—including some written by the authors of this book—that build on the Metasploit Framework. Our goal is to get you comfortable with the Framework, show you some advanced attacks, and ensure that you can apply these techniques responsibly. We hope you enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed creating it. Let the fun and games begin.
A Brief History of Metasploit
Metasploit was originally developed and conceived by HD Moore while he was employed by a security firm. When HD realized that he was spending most of his time validating and sanitizing public exploit code, he began to create a flexible and maintainable framework for the creation and development of exploits. He released his first edition of the Perl-based Metasploit in October 2003 with a total of 11 exploits. With the help of Spoonm, HD released a total rewrite of the project, Metasploit 2.0, in April 2004. This version included 19 exploits and over 27 payloads. Shortly after this release, Matt Miller (Skape) joined the Metasploit development team, and as the project gained popularity, the Metasploit Framework received heavy backing from the information security community and quickly became a necessary tool for penetration testing and exploitation.
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Following a complete rewrite in the Ruby programming language, the Metasploit team released Metasploit 3.0 in 2007. The migration of the Framework from Perl to Ruby took 18 months and resulted in over 150,000 lines of new code. With the 3.0 release, Metasploit saw widespread adoption in the security community and a big increase in user contributions. In fall 2009, Metasploit was acquired by Rapid7, a leader in the vulnerability-scanning field, which allowed HD to build a team to focus solely on the development of the Metasploit Framework. Since the acquisition, updates have occurred more rapidly than anyone could have imagined. Rapid7 released two commercial products based on the Metasploit Framework: Metasploit Express and Metasploit Pro. Metasploit Express is a lighter version of the Metasploit Framework with a GUI and additional functionality, including reporting, among other useful features. Metasploit Pro is an expanded version of Metasploit Express that touts collaboration and group penetration testing and such features as a one-click virtual private network (VPN) tunnel and much more.
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