Making Metasploit effective and powerful using supplementary tools

So far we have seen that Metasploit is really a powerful framework for penetration testing. However, it can be made even more useful if integrated with some other tools. This section covers a few tools that compliment Metasploit's capability to perform more precise penetration on the target system.

Nessus

Nessus is a product from Tenable Network Security and is one of the most popular vulnerability assessment tools. It belongs to the vulnerability scanner category. It is quite easy to use, and it quickly finds out infrastructure-level vulnerabilities in the target system. Once Nessus tells us what vulnerabilities exist on the target system, we can then feed those vulnerabilities to Metasploit to see whether they can be exploited for real.

Its official website is https://www.tenable.com/. The following image shows the Nessus homepage:

Nessus web interface for initiating vulnerability assessments

The following are the different...