Both nmap and wireshark are two penetration testing mainstay tools that are highly recommended to learn. I’ve been exploring both of their functionality, but know that it will take some time to even begin to harness The Power that resides therein.

One of the tools that nmap offers is a scripting engine, which I decided to learn more about – it seems a great way to run a vulnerability test on one’s own. I used this package on GitHub.

As the description notes, NSE script uses info about known services to provide data on vulnerabilities – just what we want!

I downloaded the zip file, which subsequently gave me an opportunity to practice recursively moving files from one folder (/Downloads) to another folder (/usr/share/nmap/scripts). This was all downloaded and I moved the vulners script file to the aforementioned nmap scripts folder.

I started up Metasploitable as a VM, got the IP address, and used that as an argument for using the nmap script, like this:

# nmap -sV --script vulners 10.0.0.110 > <outputfile.txt>

This was just a sampling of some of the vulnerabilities described in Metasploitable. What was interesting to note that many of the CVE vulnerability numbers were provided- so you could then go to the CVE database and learn more about them there. Very handy!