Chapter 4: Information Gathering with Metasploit
Information gathering and enumeration are the initial stages of the penetration testing life cycle. These stages are often overlooked, and people end up directly using automated tools in an attempt to quickly compromise the target. However, such attempts are not likely to succeed.
This is a very famous quote by Abraham Lincoln that is applicable to penetration testing as well! The more effort you take to gather information about your targets and enumerate them, the more likely you are to succeed with compromising. By performing comprehensive information gathering and enumeration, you will be presented with a wealth of information about your target, and then you can use that information in order to identify the best attack vector for compromising the target.
The Metasploit Framework provides various...