Information Gathering with Metasploit !

Your goals during intelligence gathering should be to gain

accurate information about your targets without revealing

your presence or your intentions, to learn how the

organization operates, and to determine the best route

of entry.

If you don’t do a thorough job of intelligence gathering, you may

miss vulnerable systems.

It takes time and patience to

sort through web pages, perform Google hacking, and map systems

thoroughly in an attempt to understand the infrastructure of a

particular target.

At this step, you will attempt to collect

as much information about the target environment as possible.

 Port Scanning :

we conduct port scans for open ports on

the target or conduct scans to determine what services are running.

Each system or running service that we discover gives us another

opportunity for exploitation. But beware: If you get careless while

active information gathering, you might be nabbed by an IDS or

intrusion prevention system (IPS)—not a good outcome for the covert

penetration tester.

Nmap is, by far, the most popular port scanning tool. It integrates

with Metasploit quite elegantly, storing scan output in a database.

Nmap lets you scan hosts to identify the services running on each,

any of which might offer a way in.

Nmap has a quite a few options, but we’ll use just a few of them for

the most part.

One of our preferred nmap options is -sS. This runs a stealth TCP scan

that determines whether a specific TCP-based port is open. Another

preferred option is -Pn, which tells nmap not to use ping to determine

whether a system is running; instead, it considers all hosts “alive.”

Now let’s run a quick nmap scan against a target using

both the -sS and -Pn flags:

root@kali:~# nmap -sS -Pn 127.0.0.1

When scan is completed, nmap reports a list of open ports, along with

a description of the associated service for each.

For more detail, try using the -A flag. This option will attempt

advanced service enumeration and banner grabbing, which may give you

even more details about the target system.

root@kali:~# nmap -Pn -sS -A 127.0.0.1

Working with Databases in Metasploit :

When you’re running a complex penetration test with a lot of targets,

keeping track of everything can be a challenge. Luckily, Metasploit

has you covered with expansive support for multiple database systems.

To ensure that database support is available for your system, you should

first decide which database system you want to run. Metasploit supports

MySQL and PostgreSQL; because PostgreSQL is the default, we’ll stick with

it in this discussion.

First, we start the database subsystem using the built-in kali-linux

init.d scripts.

root@kali~# /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 start

After PostgreSQL has started, we tell the Framework to connect to the

database instance. This connection requires a username, password, name of

the host on which the database is running, and the database name we want to

use.

Let’s make the connection.

msf > db_connect postgres:toor@127.0.0.1/msfbook

For now, we’ll use db_status to make sure that we’re connected

correctly.

Intelligence Gathering 21

msf > db_status
[*] postgresql connected to msfbook

Importing Nmap Results into Metasploit :

First, we scan the target machine using the -oX option to generate

a Subnet1.xml file:

nmap -Pn -sS -A -oX Subnet1 192.168.1.0

After generating the XML file, we use the db_import command to import

it into our database. We can then verify that the import worked by using the

db_hosts command, which lists the systems entries that have been created, as

shown here:

msf > db_connect postgres:toor@127.0.0.1/msf3
msf > db_import Subnet1.xml
msf > db_hosts -c address