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