Metasploit Overview¶

Metasploit is more than just a ‘tool’, it was envisioned as a Framework where tools, exploits, payloads and other hacker-related things would be able to exist, allowing a penetration tester/hacker/researcher to focus on what they wanted to do instead of having to cobble together many different scripts.

Metasploit has been growing in size since its first release in 2003, first built by a man named HD Moore using some basic perl scripts. Metasploit 2.0 was released in October 2004, by Moore and a larger team and has been expanding ever since with contributions from the larger hacker-centric community.

Metasploit is essentially a console where many different modules work together to allow a pentester to set common components up and then execute code against potentially vulnerable targets.

The exploits within Metasploit are many and varied – you can attack anything from a Mainframe to a Smartphone with a few simple commands. And the exploits and payloads within Metasploit are configurable and can be updated whenever there are newly released vulnerabilities.