Beginning with the interfaces – the "Hello World" of Metasploit

Interfaces provide a front end for the user to communicate with the software or platform. Metasploit has four interfaces namely msfgui, msfweb, msfcli, and msfconsole. It is highly recommended that you check out all the interfaces, but here in this book we will primarily focus on the msfconsole interface. It is the most powerful and fully integrated interface among them all.

Getting ready

Boot up your operating system on which you have installed Metasploit. If you are using it on a virtual machine then start it.

How to do it...

Launching msfconsole is an easy task. Follow these steps:

1. For a Windows operating system, you can launch msfconsole by going to Start | metasploit framework | msfconsole.

2. For BackTrack you can browse to Applications | Exploitation tools | Network exploitation tools | Metasploit framework | msfconsole.

3. To launch it directly from the terminal add the following command:

   root@bt:~# cd /pentest/exploits/framework3

4. The working directory will change to framework3. Entering the following command will start our msfconsole:

root@bt:/pentest/exploits/framework3# ./msfconsole

Now, our msfconsole interface is up and running, and ready to receive the commands.

How it works...

Metasploit interfaces extend the base library which enables them to evoke initial functionalities of the framework. Simple commands, such as setting up exploits and payloads, running updates, and configuring the database can be executed. Once the process grows deep, the other functional libraries are called accordingly.

There's more...

Let us add some additional stuff that you can perform at this stage with the msfconsole interface.

Some commands to try out and get started

Here are some commands that you can try out to explore deeper:

• msf > ls: The ls command will list all the directories and files that are available. You can further navigate deeper into other directories to explore further.

• msf > help: This command will list all the available commands for the Metasploit framework that we can use. The commands are categorized into core commands and database backend commands. The former contains commands which are directly related to the framework, while the latter provides commands to interact with the database.

• msf > msfupdate: This command should be used frequently to update the framework with the latest exploits, payloads, libraries, and so on.