Information Gathering with Metasploit

Information gathering and enumeration are the initial stages of penetration testing life cycle. These stages are often overlooked, and people directly end up using automated tools in an attempt to quickly compromise the target. However, such attempts are less likely to succeed.

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
- Abraham Lincoln

This is a very famous quote by Abraham Lincoln which is applicable to penetration testing as well! The more efforts you take to gather information about your targets and enumerate them, the more likely you are to succeed with compromise. By performing comprehensive information gathering and enumeration, you will be presented with wealth of information about your target, and then you can precisely decide the attack vector in order to compromise the...