


The flexibility and usefulness of this tool prompted the Nmap Project to produce Ncat, a modern reimplementation which supports SSL, IPv6, SOCKS and http proxies, connection brokering, and more. It can sometimes even be hard to find a copy of the v1.10 source code. The original Netcat was released by Hobbit in 1995, but it hasn't been maintained despite its popularity. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need, including port binding to accept incoming connections. It is designed to be a reliable back-end tool to use directly or easily drive by other programs and scripts. This simple utility reads and writes data across TCP or UDP network connections. The Community, Express, and Pro editions have web-based GUIs. The Metasploit Framework now includes an official Java-based GUI and also Raphael Mudge's excellent Armitage.

Other paid exploitation tools to consider are Core Impact (more expensive) and Canvas (less). The Framework itself is still free and open source, but they now also offer a free-but-limited Community edition, a more advanced Express edition ($5,000 per year per user), and a full-featured Pro edition. Metasploit was completely free, but the project was acquired by Rapid7 in 2009 and it soon sprouted commercial variants. One free extra is Metasploitable, an intentionally insecure Linux virtual machine you can use for testing Metasploit and other exploitation tools without hitting live servers. This makes writing your own exploits easier, and it certainly beats scouring the darkest corners of the Internet for illicit shellcode of dubious quality.

It ships with hundreds of exploits, as you can see in their list of modules. The extensible model through which payloads, encoders, no-op generators, and exploits can be integrated has made it possible to use the Metasploit Framework as an outlet for cutting-edge exploitation research. It is an advanced open-source platform for developing, testing, and using exploit code. Metasploit took the security world by storm when it was released in 2004.
