Nmap Essentials

Scanning with Metasploit

While Nmap's primary strength lies in performing fast, scalable port scans, and Nessus's forte is conducting in-depth vulnerability scans and misconfiguration detection checks, Metasploit excels in actually exploiting vulnerabilities on a one-off basis. In a security assessment, Metasploit is generally brought to the table as a last step: once the vulnerabilities are enumerated from other tools, Metasploit can actually exploit them. Sensitive data, compromised machines, and more, can easily be exfiltrated using Metasploit and a variety of tools that come packaged with the framework.

Metasploit can easily have a whole book dedicated to its usage—and, in fact, it does—but we'll go over the basic scanning and exploitation ...