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A Brief Guide of Metasploit

Threat Intelligence • Jul 18, 2021

If you’re familiar with cybersecurity at all, then you are no doubt aware of the value of penetration testing. As cybercriminals seek to find new vulnerabilities and develop new exploits, penetration testing continues to become more important than ever for the security of any network. Fortunately, just as the sophistication of cybercrime has developed, so have the tools we use to help fight it, and one very powerful tool is an automated system called Metasploit. Metasploit is a modular, Ruby-based, open-source framework that can probe and verify enterprise vulnerabilities, execute attacks, and evade detection. Offensive security teams also leverage its toolset to manage security assessments and improve security awareness.

A History of Metasploit

Released in 2003, Metasploit originally had only 11 exploits. However, since being acquired by Rapid7 in 2009, Metasploit has become an open-source program, which has now amassed over 2,300 exploits and almost 4,000 modules and payloads. Metasploit is now one of the world’s most popular frameworks for automating many aspects of penetration testing. Many zero-day reports also include a Metasploit module as proof-of-concept.

Metasploit Benefits

Metasploit integrates with the open-source Metasploit Framework to provide a wide range of exploitation and reconnaissance modules. It incorporates numerous attacker techniques, such as finding weak credentials (e.g. recycled passwords), evading antivirus and other security software, and finding backdoors, so as to maintain persistence throughout a network. Metasploit also contains a vast library of ready-made codes and viruses (and allows you the tools to build custom-made malware!) into a network. Among other things, these codes can simulate real-world social engineering or phishing campaigns to harvest credentials and deliver payloads. They can also run brute-force attacks against databases, web servers, and remote administration solutions. Like we said: it is powerful .
Metasploit is also easy to use. Once it’s installed, penetration testers can easily obtain information about the target system, find a way into the network, and then pick an exploit and payload. It can also be used to find weak spots, and prioritize vulnerabilities and attack vectors by impact. Unlike traditional command line interface (CLI) tools, Metasploit easily scales to support thousands of hosts and automate many penetration testing steps. Lastly, it generates data-rich, action-oriented reports to help organizations remediate these vulnerabilities faster.

The Metasploit Framework and Modules

Metasploit Framework is a modular system, each module is designed to accomplish a specific task, including:

Exploits: Deliberately take advantage of weaknesses in the target system to access sensitive information and/or deliver payloads
Payloads: Malicious code sets (e.g. Meterpreter ) used to attack target systems
Auxiliary: Scanners, fuzzers, DoS attacks and SQL injection tools to understand the target system and transition to exploit modules
Shellcode: Sub-module in a payload that uploads malicious code, and executes the commands inside the payload
Listeners: Handlers that interact with the sessions established by payloads
Post-exploitation code: Enables further testing once the (ethical) hacker is already inside the target system
NOP generator: Produces a series of random bytes to bypass standard IDS and IPS NOP-sled signatures (buffer overflow)

The Metasploit installer includes all the necessary dependencies, as well as MSFconsole (a CLI access to the Metasploit framework), and tools like John the Ripper and NMap.

How to Use Metasploit: Brief Metasploit Tutorial

Metasploit download and install

Download a Metasploit installer from here , or get the full source code from Metasploit GitHub .

Set up the Metasploit environment

Minimum system requirements
Operating Systems

Windows Server 2008 R2/2012 R2/2016/2019
Windows 7 SP1+/8.1/10
Ubuntu Linux 14.04/16.04/18.04 (recommended)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5.10/6.5/7.1/8 (or later)

Hardware

2 GHz+ processor
Minimum 4 GB RAM (8 GB recommended)
Minimum 1 GB disk space (50 GB recommended)

Browsers

Microsoft Edge (latest)
Mozilla Firefox (latest)
Google Chrome (latest)

Install Virtual Box

Before learning how to use Metasploit, set up a hypervisor to run the attacking machine (Kali Linux) and a victim machine (metasploitable2) in a safe and secluded network environment. VirtualBox is one such (free) hypervisor. Other options are KVM, VMware Player, VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion.

Install Kali Linux

Kali Linux is an advanced, free Linux distribution for pen testing and security auditing.

Start Using Metasploit

Once you have the Metasploit machine and the target machine set up, you can begin playing around with Metasploit.

Evolve Automated Penetration Testing

Evolve is a new approach to securing systems and applications. You can execute on-demand automated penetration testing to identify key attack vectors and security flaws faster than ever before. ‘Location-Agnostic Penetration Testing’ now allows penetration testing environments to be orchestrated in the cloud or across your organization’s security zones. It will give you better quality penetration
testing and repeatable real-time verification of risks.
Get started now!

Conclusion

In the ever-expanding cyberthreat landscape, security teams need to understand the vulnerabilities in their systems and plug them before bad actors can take advantage. Powerful frameworks like Metasploit enable organizations (and even home networks) to successfully test and find any such vulnerabilities. Metasploit provides powerful tools for exploitation, privilege escalation, packet sniffing, keyloggers, pivoting and more. It includes thousands of exploits and payloads, with more being added every year. Modular, extensible and scalable, Metasploit is supported by a vibrant open source community, making it one of the best pentest automation tools available today, and a vital part of any organization’s security ecosystem.

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