Setting up vulnerable targets in a VM
Metasploit is a powerful penetration testing framework that, if not used in a controlled manner, can cause potential damage to the target system. For the sake of learning about and practicing with Metasploit, we can certainly not use it on any live production system for which we don't have authorized permission. However, we can practice our newly acquired Metasploit skills in our own virtual environment, which has deliberately been made vulnerable. This can be achieved through a Linux-based system called Metasploitable, which has many different trivial vulnerabilities, ranging from OS- to application-level vulnerabilities. Metasploitable is a ready-to-use VM that can be downloaded from the following location: https://sourceforge.net/projects/metasploitable/files/Metasploitable2/.
Once it's downloaded, in order to run the VM, you need to have VMPlayer or VMware Workstation installed on your system.
Important Note
VMPlayer can...
