There are numerous tools used in the Penetration Testing (pen testing) process, and there are plenty of books that go into how to use the individual tools.  There are very few resources that discuss how the tools are used and how to approach the process.  Parts 1 and 2 encompass the basic outline of what was presented at a talk given to the Duke University ACM Chapter with some minor changes.

In Part 1, we took the viewer through the initial network recon stage through actual exploitation using Metasploit.  Initially the network is scanned through Nmap, and then continued with Nessus.  We importing the Nessus vulnerabilities directly into Metasploit, determined the corresponding modules for the specific host, then used the module to compromise a remote Microsoft Windows XP box.

Part 2 covers some of the post-exploitation tasks that a pen tester may use.  It begins with some basic Meterpreter tasks.  Meterpreter is a specialized pen testing shell that is included in Metasploit as a payload.  Using Meterpreter, password hashes are obtained from the exploited machine, and 0phcrack is used to crack the obtained passwords.  While the passwords are cracking offline, the viewer is taken back to Meterpreter in order to create a hidden cmd.exe shell on the remote host. Finally we create a new user and add that user to the Administrators group. Ready to see it in action?