Automate vulnerability scanning with NSE

There may also be occasions where it might be helpful to develop a script that combines vulnerability scanning with exploitation. Let's say we want to scan a group of machines for a specific exploit and then, if found, run that exploit against the vulnerable machine(s). Vulnerability scanning can often turn up false positives, so by performing subsequent exploitation of vulnerability scan findings, one can have immediate validation of the legitimacy of those findings. In this recipe, a Bash script will be used to execute the smb-vuln-ms08-067.nse script to determine whether a host is vulnerable to the MS08-067 NetAPI exploit, and if the NSE script indicates that it is, Metasploit will be used to automatically attempt to exploit it for verification.

Getting ready

To use the script demonstrated in this recipe, you will need to have access to a system that is running a vulnerable service that can be identified using an NSE script and exploited with Metasploit...