Metasploit team released Metasploit Vulnerable Services Emulator

Rapid7 released the Metasploit Vulnerable Services Emulator, a new tool that can be used by IT experts to emulate vulnerable services.

Which is the best way to protect a system? You need to think of the system in the attacker’s perspective, for this reason, Metasploit has now a new tool that can be used to emulate vulnerable service, the Metasploit Vulnerable Services Emulator. The tool is open source, it was designed to give users a vulnerable OS platform that could allow security experts to test the thousands of Metasploit modules available for its community.

“There’s one problem: it’s hard to use Metasploit without vulnerable services to play against.” wrote Jin Qian in a blog post. “We developed the Vulnerable Services Emulator to fill this gap. It is a framework that makes it easy to emulate the vulnerable services for penetration testing purposes”

In the past, Metasploit released two vulnerable OS images, Metasploitable2 and Metasploitable3, with this purpose. but their use was limited due to the small subset of the thousands of Metasploit modules available for users.

The Metasploit Vulnerable Services Emulator is available on GitHub, it already emulates more than 100 vulnerable services as explained by Qian.

“Right now, it emulates over 100 vulnerable services, covering things like compromising credentials, getting a shell from the victim, and more. After going through module exercises, users can learn details about security vulnerabilities and how to test them, and are encouraged to continue to learn and play with Metasploit’s capabilities,” said Qian.

The Metasploit Vulnerable Services Emulator works on Windows, Mac or Linux. It is very easy to install and use, as a prerequisite it requires the installation of a working Perl installation.

The developers who designed the tool used JSON to describe vulnerable services, a choice to make independent the platform from the specific programming language.

“We know developers have very different preferences on programming languages, so instead of implementing the vulnerable services using a particular language, the framework describes vulnerable service interactions in JSON.” continues the post. “It’s not a programming language per se but it has enough logic for service emulation. The following is the description for the vulnerable printer service.”

Security experts can use the Metasploit Vulnerable Services Emulator to test their Metasploit modules or to get training on Metasploit.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Metasploit Vulnerable Services Emulator, hacking)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.