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Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's Guide
"The best guide to the Metasploit Framework."--HD Moore, Founder of the Metasploit Project The Metasploit Framework makes discovering, exploiting, and sharing vulnerabilities quick and relatively painless. But while Metasploit is used by security professionals everywhere, the tool can be hard to grasp for first-time users. "Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's" Guide fills this gap by teaching you how to harness the Framework and interact with the vibrant community of Metasploit contributors.
Once you've built your foundation for penetration testing, you'll learn the Framework's conventions, interfaces, and module system as you launch simulated attacks. You'll move on to advanced penetration testing techniques, including network reconnaissance and enumeration, client-side attacks, wireless attacks, and targeted social-engineering attacks.
Learn how to: Find and exploit unmaintained, misconfigured, and unpatched systemsPerform reconnaissance and find valuable information about your targetBypass anti-virus technologies and circumvent security controlsIntegrate Nmap, NeXpose, and Nessus with Metasploit to automate discoveryUse the Meterpreter shell to launch further attacks from inside the networkHarness standalone Metasploit utilities, third-party tools, and plug-insLearn how to write your own Meterpreter post exploitation modules and scripts
You'll even touch on exploit discovery for zero-day research, write a fuzzer, port existing exploits into the Framework, and learn how to cover your tracks. Whether your goal is to secure your own networks or to put someone else's to the test, "Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's Guide" will take you there and beyond.
Once you've built your foundation for penetration testing, you'll learn the Framework's conventions, interfaces, and module system as you launch simulated attacks. You'll move on to advanced penetration testing techniques, including network reconnaissance and enumeration, client-side attacks, wireless attacks, and targeted social-engineering attacks.
Learn how to: Find and exploit unmaintained, misconfigured, and unpatched systemsPerform reconnaissance and find valuable information about your targetBypass anti-virus technologies and circumvent security controlsIntegrate Nmap, NeXpose, and Nessus with Metasploit to automate discoveryUse the Meterpreter shell to launch further attacks from inside the networkHarness standalone Metasploit utilities, third-party tools, and plug-insLearn how to write your own Meterpreter post exploitation modules and scripts
You'll even touch on exploit discovery for zero-day research, write a fuzzer, port existing exploits into the Framework, and learn how to cover your tracks. Whether your goal is to secure your own networks or to put someone else's to the test, "Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's Guide" will take you there and beyond.
564 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 15, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 37 reviews
August 23, 2011
Where to start? The Metasploit Framework (MSF) is a very popular penetration testing tool used by security professionals the world over. It was previously written in Perl but underwent a complete rewrite for version 3, where the developers switched the project to Ruby. The tool unifies the various stages of penetration testing in convenient interfaces (“msfconsole” for interactive use and “msfcli” for scripting purposes): information gathering and storage, exploit and payload configuration, IDS and antivirus evasion and actually exploiting the system.
From this you probably can gather that Metasploit is quite big and complex, as well as in a state of constant flux. This makes it rather hard to write a definitive book on it, which is illustrated by the fact that shortly after this volume got published, the Metasploit team released version 4 of the framework. Considering these difficulties, I’m tempted to say that the authors have done a tremendous job describing MSF as it was at the time of writing.
Now for the actual content: after a foreword by Metasploit’s main developer HD Moore, there’s a little introduction section on penetration testing and the history of the framework. This is followed by the first chapter, which covers some penetration testing basics. After this the authors give a first introduction to the MSF, before dedicating a chapter each to various phases of pen testing, namely information gathering, vulnerability scanning and the actual exploitation. After this you’ll find a whole chapter on Meterpreter, covering various aspects of post-exploitation techniques. Once you get to this point, you should have a good idea about how Metasploit works in principle and how capable it is. The authors don’t stop here though, but use the following chapters to try to teach you about avoiding detection, client-side exploits and Metasploit’s auxiliary modules. By this point in the book it felt like I already had learned a lot, but then I realized that I’m only halfway through the book! There still were chapters on various topics, including the social-engineering toolkit which is built in the MSF and wireless exploitation with Karmetasploit. As a Ruby developer/dev ops guy I was really interested in the next couple of chapters, which deal with building your own modules and exploits as well as porting existing exploits to Metasploit and Meterpreter scripting. Wow, the authors definitely covered a lot of ground until here, but we are still not done, since there’s on more chapter on how to simulate your pen tests.
While the above shows what the book covered, it doesn’t say much on how it was covered. In my opinion the authors did a very good job, the text is easy to follow and to the point and helped by screenshots and transcripts of “msfconsole” sessions. Sure, most of this material is also available on the Metasploit Unleashed web site, but I like having it all in the form of one compact book. I noticed 2-3 places where the textual description and the content of the screenshot/transcript didn’t exactly match, which can lead to brief moments of confusion, but nothing dramatic.
If you are new to Metasploit and want to get up to speed quickly, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll find a better book at the moment. More experienced users of the framework should flip through it in a book store to decide how much they’ll really get from it, but it’s probably still a good book to have around, even if it’s just for the cheat sheet in Appendix B.
From this you probably can gather that Metasploit is quite big and complex, as well as in a state of constant flux. This makes it rather hard to write a definitive book on it, which is illustrated by the fact that shortly after this volume got published, the Metasploit team released version 4 of the framework. Considering these difficulties, I’m tempted to say that the authors have done a tremendous job describing MSF as it was at the time of writing.
Now for the actual content: after a foreword by Metasploit’s main developer HD Moore, there’s a little introduction section on penetration testing and the history of the framework. This is followed by the first chapter, which covers some penetration testing basics. After this the authors give a first introduction to the MSF, before dedicating a chapter each to various phases of pen testing, namely information gathering, vulnerability scanning and the actual exploitation. After this you’ll find a whole chapter on Meterpreter, covering various aspects of post-exploitation techniques. Once you get to this point, you should have a good idea about how Metasploit works in principle and how capable it is. The authors don’t stop here though, but use the following chapters to try to teach you about avoiding detection, client-side exploits and Metasploit’s auxiliary modules. By this point in the book it felt like I already had learned a lot, but then I realized that I’m only halfway through the book! There still were chapters on various topics, including the social-engineering toolkit which is built in the MSF and wireless exploitation with Karmetasploit. As a Ruby developer/dev ops guy I was really interested in the next couple of chapters, which deal with building your own modules and exploits as well as porting existing exploits to Metasploit and Meterpreter scripting. Wow, the authors definitely covered a lot of ground until here, but we are still not done, since there’s on more chapter on how to simulate your pen tests.
While the above shows what the book covered, it doesn’t say much on how it was covered. In my opinion the authors did a very good job, the text is easy to follow and to the point and helped by screenshots and transcripts of “msfconsole” sessions. Sure, most of this material is also available on the Metasploit Unleashed web site, but I like having it all in the form of one compact book. I noticed 2-3 places where the textual description and the content of the screenshot/transcript didn’t exactly match, which can lead to brief moments of confusion, but nothing dramatic.
If you are new to Metasploit and want to get up to speed quickly, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll find a better book at the moment. More experienced users of the framework should flip through it in a book store to decide how much they’ll really get from it, but it’s probably still a good book to have around, even if it’s just for the cheat sheet in Appendix B.
April 16, 2020
METASPLOIT – THE PENETRATION TESTER’S GUIDE
This book has around 300 pages and 4 authors wrote this book: (From the book)
David Kennedy is the chief information security officer at Diebold Incorporated and creator of the Social-Engineer Toolkit (SET), FastTrack and other open-source tools. He is also on the BackTrack and ExploitDB development team and is a core member of the Social-Engineer podcast and framework.
Jim O’Gorman is a professional penetration tester with CSC’s StrikeForce, a co-founder of Scoail-Engineer.org and an instructor at Offensive-Security. He is involved in digital investigations and malware analysis and helped build forensic capabilities into BackTrack Linux.
Devon Kearns is an instructor at Offensive-Security, a BackTrack Linux developer and administrator of the ExploitDB. He has contributed a number of Metasploit exploit modules and is the maintainer of the Metasploit Unleashed wiki.
Mati Aharoni is the creator of the BackTrack Linux distribution and founder of Offensive-Security.
ABOUT the BOOK
After giving a basic story of the book and the Metasploit tool. it starts with the Metasploit basics.
Basic terminologies like exploit, payload, shellcode, module and listener then authors explained Metasploit interfaces like msfconsole, msfcli(armitage) and Metasploit utilities like msfpayload and msfencode. It shows the intelligence-gathering tools; whois, Netcraft, nslookup, Nmap tool and basic usage knowledge of these tools. Then continues with the Metasploit intelligence gathering modules like auxiliary and scanners and contains port scanning and network management protocol sweeping techniques and some other custom service scanners. Then you will see vulnerability scanning, scanning with NeXpose and Nessus usage, configuration and basic explanation about the tool then importing the report of these tools to the Metasploit and running them within the Metasploit framework. It also contains scanning the SMB logins, OpenVNC, OpenX11 Servers.
Exploitation starts with the “The Joy of the Exploitations” chapter with the classic exploit, ms08_067_netapi, the authors show how to use an exploit in the Metasploit framework, basic commands, options, etc. After successful exploitation, you need to know what a hacker can do with the targeted machine. So, you can learn the meterpreter shell. Beginning to end; it goes like scanning the target machine and gathering information and with the correct exploit and gaining a meterpreter shell.
However, it is not always easy to exploit a system, you will encounter some antivirus, firewalls, etc. So, avoiding detection with encoding your payload with the Metasploit tools as msfpayload and msfencode. Hackers’ job is not finished after gaining access to the system and getting what they want to get, they need to cover their tracks in the system. After all that, you find browser-based exploits, file format exploits, sending the payloads, social engineering tools like toolkits, phishing attacks, web attack vectors, infectious media generations, etc.
Wireless Security Tools topic covered with Karmetasploit that is developed by Dino Dai Zovi and Shane Macaulay and you will also build your own modules, exploits and meterpreter scripts, port exploits to the metasploit.
This book has around 300 pages and 4 authors wrote this book: (From the book)
David Kennedy is the chief information security officer at Diebold Incorporated and creator of the Social-Engineer Toolkit (SET), FastTrack and other open-source tools. He is also on the BackTrack and ExploitDB development team and is a core member of the Social-Engineer podcast and framework.
Jim O’Gorman is a professional penetration tester with CSC’s StrikeForce, a co-founder of Scoail-Engineer.org and an instructor at Offensive-Security. He is involved in digital investigations and malware analysis and helped build forensic capabilities into BackTrack Linux.
Devon Kearns is an instructor at Offensive-Security, a BackTrack Linux developer and administrator of the ExploitDB. He has contributed a number of Metasploit exploit modules and is the maintainer of the Metasploit Unleashed wiki.
Mati Aharoni is the creator of the BackTrack Linux distribution and founder of Offensive-Security.
ABOUT the BOOK
After giving a basic story of the book and the Metasploit tool. it starts with the Metasploit basics.
Basic terminologies like exploit, payload, shellcode, module and listener then authors explained Metasploit interfaces like msfconsole, msfcli(armitage) and Metasploit utilities like msfpayload and msfencode. It shows the intelligence-gathering tools; whois, Netcraft, nslookup, Nmap tool and basic usage knowledge of these tools. Then continues with the Metasploit intelligence gathering modules like auxiliary and scanners and contains port scanning and network management protocol sweeping techniques and some other custom service scanners. Then you will see vulnerability scanning, scanning with NeXpose and Nessus usage, configuration and basic explanation about the tool then importing the report of these tools to the Metasploit and running them within the Metasploit framework. It also contains scanning the SMB logins, OpenVNC, OpenX11 Servers.
Exploitation starts with the “The Joy of the Exploitations” chapter with the classic exploit, ms08_067_netapi, the authors show how to use an exploit in the Metasploit framework, basic commands, options, etc. After successful exploitation, you need to know what a hacker can do with the targeted machine. So, you can learn the meterpreter shell. Beginning to end; it goes like scanning the target machine and gathering information and with the correct exploit and gaining a meterpreter shell.
However, it is not always easy to exploit a system, you will encounter some antivirus, firewalls, etc. So, avoiding detection with encoding your payload with the Metasploit tools as msfpayload and msfencode. Hackers’ job is not finished after gaining access to the system and getting what they want to get, they need to cover their tracks in the system. After all that, you find browser-based exploits, file format exploits, sending the payloads, social engineering tools like toolkits, phishing attacks, web attack vectors, infectious media generations, etc.
Wireless Security Tools topic covered with Karmetasploit that is developed by Dino Dai Zovi and Shane Macaulay and you will also build your own modules, exploits and meterpreter scripts, port exploits to the metasploit.
May 20, 2021
Książkę kupiłem dobrych parę lat temu i niestety dopiero teraz ją przeczytałem (wydanie I). To był ogromny błąd, że tak późno. Książka dosyć mocno się zdezaktualizowała. Metasploit jest już wersji 6 (rok 2021) a nie 3, ludzie już prawie zapomnieli o Windowsie XP. Nie ma już Backtrack, ale jest Kali Linux. Połączenie z bazą danych przez Msf teraz trochę inaczej wygląda, ale podstawy do nauki i ogólne zasady pozostały. Ogólnie poćwiczyć można też na starych obrazach metasploitable. Miejscami książka jest dosyć trudna i jest wymagana wiedza o assemblerze. Widziałem wydanie II, ale to już nie ci sami autorzy. Ogólnie polecam.
August 28, 2016
A good introductory to the different ways of using Metasploit. Since I had already some previous experience using Metasploit my favorite chapters were the one covering usage of Meterpreter and how to create your own module or how to port your own exploits to Metasploit framework. In the end of the book there was also a nice chapter how to set up a small and vulnerable network for testing different attacks which I also found a good addition to the book.
December 28, 2024
This book remains a valuable resource for anyone looking to learn the basics of Metasploit. Despite its age, the book provides a solid foundation and offers an excellent overview of the framework’s core functionalities. It is very well-written, with clear explanations and practical examples that make even complex concepts easy to grasp. Beyond its instructional value, I found it genuinely engaging to read, which is rare for technical books. While some content may be slightly outdated given Metasploit’s evolution, this guide is still a fantastic starting point for beginners.
July 7, 2017
This book is not just about Metasploit. It is also a great InfoSec and Pen. Testing book. A must read for anyone who wants to get into or master the field. No repetitions, well written, full of examples.
December 27, 2023
A fine overview of Metasploits features. Not much here outside of the standard documentation but a useful guide if you want something on your desk you can look through rather than navigate Rapid7s documentation.
May 22, 2019
i want to read this.
October 27, 2020
Easy to read and well structured. Although the content is very basic. This is a book for a complete beginner.
November 17, 2021
This is so cool 100%
October 28, 2023
Decent book about a very powerful penetration testing tool. Used it to write my bachelor's degree thesis. The examples are outdated, so unless there is a new edition, it might not be worth reading.
February 26, 2024
It is a book from 2011, so no surprise it is very outdated
September 2, 2017
I have gone through a paper copy of this book (that is exceedingly rare for me) that was much marked-up, dog-eared, and falling apart before I bought the Kindle version. Still one of the most useful reference books I use as a go-to whenever I get the pleasure of using Metasploit again. Lately, I have been doing more speaking and writing. But anyone who is a penetration tester looking to add to their library should absolutely have this book. Not only is it terribly informative, Dave does an amazing job of making the technical content entertaining. That alone is worth the cover price, even if you're not a hacker.
Happy hacking and hack all the things. See you all at DEF CON and DerbyCon
Happy hacking and hack all the things. See you all at DEF CON and DerbyCon
November 16, 2012
Probably one of the best penetration testing books I have ever read. You will need basic linux knowledge and a backtrack distro to be able to get most of this book. It first teaches you the basics of Metasploit then you go deeper and deeper.
some of the commands are outdated however I am pretty sure a hacker like you can manage to get him/herself updated.
And remember: Hugs are always better than handshakes !!;-)
some of the commands are outdated however I am pretty sure a hacker like you can manage to get him/herself updated.
And remember: Hugs are always better than handshakes !!;-)
August 26, 2013
I have occasionally played Metasploit with friends and recently started playing at home, so this seemed like a good guide. The first chapter adds some interesting commentary to the storyline but can be skipped by those not completely interested in the thin plot. Other than that, this book is a standard walkthrough with some hints and easter eggs. My biggest complaint is that even after reading this book cover to cover, I'm still trying to figure out how to beat this game.
Want to read
December 25, 2017"The best guide to the Metasploit Framework."\n—HD Moore, Founder of the Metasploit Project\n\n
The Metasploit Framework is a powerful suite of tools that security researchers use to investigate and resolve potential network and system vulnerabilities. Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's Guide shows readers how to assess networks by using Metasploit to launch simulated attacks that expose weaknesses in their security.
May 17, 2014
Its too short, mostly novice tutorials.
Last chapters on exploit development / adapting side exploits for Metasploit Framework and scripting were best but still too thin.
This book is more like introduction articles on Metasploit / SET / Fast Track / etc. Such famous authors could write multiple thousand+ pages volumes on each topic for good I think.
Last chapters on exploit development / adapting side exploits for Metasploit Framework and scripting were best but still too thin.
This book is more like introduction articles on Metasploit / SET / Fast Track / etc. Such famous authors could write multiple thousand+ pages volumes on each topic for good I think.
July 25, 2013
it's the best book that's i ever read it .. it's open my eyes to sea everything that's i wasn't sea it before ..
i really enjoy to read all the book and i was so sad because the book is finish ! ..
and know i recommend every one to read this book to know how thing work and to sea the world in really life ..
thaks to u Devid kenndy FOR the writting the book and shared whit us !
i really enjoy to read all the book and i was so sad because the book is finish ! ..
and know i recommend every one to read this book to know how thing work and to sea the world in really life ..
thaks to u Devid kenndy FOR the writting the book and shared whit us !
March 6, 2014
I mainly picked this up for the chapter on the Social-Engineering Toolkit, but I felt much of the content for both SET and Metasploit was already well documented online (http://www.offensive-security.com/met...). But if you prefer serial content over hyperlinked, then this is a decent version.
December 17, 2013
This book serves as an excellent way to learn the Metasploit framework. Very clear and detailed information, well explained and a great structure makes it easy to follow and assimilate. Only chapter that could have been better is the "real-life example of a complete pen test".
July 30, 2015
Although the principles within this book are still relevant and very helpful, the book is outdated and a revised version hasn't been published. An even newer version of Metasploit is being released at DEFCON 23 which will further make this book obsolete.
February 9, 2017
Along with nMap and Burpsuite, one of the indispensable tools of the trade. So much more to learn - the firehose never turns off, one just learns to take larger gulps at a time. Waving, not drowning.
September 18, 2011
Covers everything you need to know about the Metasploit framework. No more no less. I liked it.
October 8, 2012
This book is great for anyone trying to pick up advanced metasploit methodology. Great as a reference and for first timers that want a complete walk through.
October 14, 2012
Its david kennedy you really can't say any thing else. Your going to get the best from the best.
October 17, 2012
One of the best Metasploit books out there. It covers the basics but also some more advanced stuff very useful in my daily pentesting live out there :)
June 7, 2016
Great starter book for the MSF.
October 25, 2014
A fantastic resource. I think that if I worked in the field, I'd make this a book to reread regularly. Each time you'd pick out more useful details.
June 15, 2019
A very technical book that can get you up and running on metasploit; if you are patient
Displaying 1 - 29 of 37 reviews