The Art of Network Penetration Testing

appendix A. Building a virtual pentest platform

In this appendix, you create a virtual penetration test (pentest) platform similar to what an attacker would use to compromise an enterprise network. You start with the latest stable Ubuntu Desktop ISO file and create a fresh virtual machine using VMWare. Next, you install several OS dependencies with Ubuntu’s package management tool, apt. Then you compile and install the bleeding-edge version of Nmap from its source code repository. Finally, you set up the Ruby Version Manager (RVM) and PostgreSQL for use with the Metasploit framework. These tools will serve as the foundation for your pentest platform. Throughout this book, you install additional packages as needed, but the core suite of applications ...