Metasploit - Introduction

Metasploit is one of the most powerful tools used for penetration testing. Most of its resources can be found at − www.metasploit.com. It comes in two versions: commercial and free edition. There are no major differences in the two versions, so in this tutorial, we will be mostly using the Community version (free) of Metasploit.

As an Ethical Hacker, you will be using “Kali Distribution” which has the Metasploit community version embedded in it along with other ethical hacking tools. But if you want to install Metasploit as a separate tool, you can easily do so on systems that run on Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X.

The hardware requirements to install Metasploit are −

• 2 GHz+ processor
• 1 GB RAM available
• 1 GB+ available disk space

Matasploit can be used either with command prompt or with Web UI.

The recommended OS versions for Metasploit are −

• Kali Linux 2.0 or Upper Versions
• Backtrack 3 and Upper Versions
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5.10+
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6.5+
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7.1+
• Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS
• Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS
• Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Windows Server 2012 R2
• Windows 7
• Windows 8.1