In this article we will be talking about the very basics of Metasploit and the Metasploit commands used in the command line interface. At first the MSF console command line and the number of available commands might seem a lot and hard to understand and use, but don’t be intimidated by them. Once you get to understand the concept and the clear structure it will be very easy. If we put it all together the Metasploit framework consists of the core and base, a lot of exploits, payloads, modules (Ruby classes), plugin’s, scripts and multiple user interfaces. Metasploit framework also contains some great information gathering tools called auxiliary modules. Auxiliary modules can be used for port scanning, service identification, password sniffing and Windows patch enumeration. Metasploit is highly customizable for advanced users and can be customized the meet your custom needs by writing your own exploits, modules, plugin’s and scripts. If Metasploit doesn’t provide the information gathering module you need by default, than you can simply write it yourself.

The msfconsole is the user interface known to be the most stable interface and the one we will be working with throughout the Metasploit tutorials on Hacking Tutorials. Apart from the stability, another benefit of the msfconsole is the option to execute external commands like the ping command and the tab auto completion. There is also a graphical user interface available for Metasploit called Armitage. We will be looking at Armitage and how to use it instead of msfconsole in a later tutorial. Let’s continue this Metasploit commands tutorial with updating the Metasploit Framework if necessary and then switch to the msfconsole to see what commands are available to us.

Meterpreter Basic Commands

Help

The ‘help’ command, as may be expected, displays the Meterpreter help menu.

PS

The ‘ps’ command displays a list of running processes on the target.

LS

As in Linux, the ‘ls’ command will list the files in the current remote directory.

Ipconfig

The ‘ipconfig’ command displays the network interfaces and addresses on the remote machine.

Getuid

Running ‘getuid’ will display the user that the Meterpreter server is running as on the host.

Download

The ‘download’ command downloads a file from the remote machine. Note the use of the double-slashes when giving the Windows path.

Upload

As with the ‘download’ command, you need to use double-slashes with the ‘upload’ command.

Shell

The ‘shell’ command will present you with a standard shell on the target system.

help

List available commands.

info

Get more info about a module.

Search

Search for specific module.

show target

View a list of platforms that the module supports

connect

Similar to netcat.

Jobs

Display/manage jobs.

Exit

Exit MSF.