Metasploit Express – popular tool hits mainstream

by Steve Ragan - Apr 23 2010, 17:00

Due to ship in May, Metasploit Express is a commercial version of the popular pentesting tool that is beefed up to make life easier for the IT professional who isn’t necessarily a security expert, but maintains security as part of their day to day role on the network.

When Rapid7 acquired Metasploit, one of the first things mentioned was the fact that the Open Source Metasploit project would not change. The same holds true now that a commercial version is coming to market. 

When asked, HD Moore, Rapid7 CSO and Metasploit chief architect, told The Tech Herald that Metasploit Express was the type of product he’s been thinking about for years now. “This is where I wanted the initial project to go. It’s a great first step and will shape things going forward.”

Metasploit Express is mostly a workflow manager. The way it was explained to us during a briefing is that it offers automation for the most common tools that are in Metasploit itself.

In truth, Metasploit Express came about after some polling of pentesters that highlighted the fact that most use exploits for about 10-15 percent of the actual task at hand, opting for a manual process after they have accessed the resource they are targeting.

For this reason, Metasploit Express uses a streamlined UI and workflow to help pentesters within a company to track things that are most important to them. For example, once an exploit is used to access a system or network, the workflow will take them to another step, such as checking for systems that are reusing passwords. Such cases would include Windows login passwords that are used for the database servers as well.

When it ships, Metasploit Express will have built-in support for Rapid7’s NeXpose Community Edition vulnerability scanner, Nmap, standard Metasploit modules, and other third-party tools.

In other news, the Metasploit Project is preparing for the release of version 3.4 of the Metasploit Framework, which will include major improvements made to the Meterpreter payload, the expansion of the framework’s brute force capabilities, and the complete overhaul of the backend database schema and event subsystem. In addition, more than 60 exploit modules and 40 auxiliary modules will be added with version 3.4.

Metasploit Express will cost $3,000 USD per user per year.

 

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