archiveJun 5, 2020

Metasploit Lab Setup

Hardware baselines and lab layout for running Metasploit against Metasploitable and Windows VMs without exposing them to the public internet.

root@kali:~# msfconsole
                                                  
IIIIII    dTb.dTb        _.---._
  II     4'  v  'B   .'"".'/|\\`.""'.
  II     6.     .P  :  .' / | \\ `.  :
  II     'T;. .;P'  '.'  /  |  \\  `.'
  II      'T; ;P'    `. /   |   \\ .'
IIIIII     'YvP'       `-.__|__.-'
 
I love shells --egypt
 
       =[ metasploit v5.0.2-dev                           ]
+ -- --=[ 1852 exploits - 1046 auxiliary - 325 post       ]
+ -- --=[ 541 payloads - 44 encoders - 10 nops            ]
+ -- --=[ 2 evasion                                       ]
+ -- --=[ ** This is Metasploit 5 development branch **   ]

Hard drive space

At least 10 GB free storage
Use NTFS, EXT3, or another filesystem that handles large files
Plan for about 30 GB if you want headroom

Available memory

Give the host OS and each guest enough RAM.
Linux host minimum: 1 GB system memory (2 GB is more comfortable)
Kali Linux guest minimum: 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended)

Processor

Prefer a 64-bit multi-core CPU.

You can also run Kali and Metasploit on AWS and point them at external targets. Cloud-hosted setups are common for that kind of work.

METASPLOITABLE (target environment)

One hard part of learning an exploitation framework is finding a safe target. Metasploitable is an intentionally vulnerable Linux VM built for security training, tool testing, and practice pentests.