How to Install Metasploitable3 on Windows 10

A good home lab is indispensable for an ethical hacker to practice his/her craft without causing grief to others. A budding Pen tester has to practice on varied targets to gain wider experience. This article will give you step by step instructions for the installation of Metasploitable3 on Windows 10.

The installation process may take at least a couple of hours depending upon your machine and Internet connection speed. The Metasploitable3 is a vulnerable Windows 2008 server with many vulnerable applications.

According to Rapid7’s GitHub page “Metsaploitable3 is a virtual machine that is built from the ground up with a large amount of security vulnerabilities. It is intended to be used a target for testing exploits with Metasploit”.

Let us get started with the installation of Metasploitable3!

Prerequisite

The prerequisite for the installation of Metasploitable3 are as below:

Latest version of Oracle VirtualBox

Latest version of Oracle VirtualBoxExtensions

Step 1: Download and Install packer on the local host

-Please download the 64-bit packer from https://packer.io/downloads.html

Create a new folder with packer name and save the uncompressed packer to the newly created folder at C:\Program Files\packer folder

Now add the environmental variable by right-clicking this PC- => Click on advance system setting => to click on environment variables => select the Path in the System variables windowà click on edit => New àfill with C:\Program Files\packer => OK. (See below environmental variable setting screenshot).

Open the command prompt and type packer and enter. You should see below which confirms the successful installation of the packer on your machine.

Step 2: Vagrant installation

-Go to https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html to download 64-bit windows vagrant executable.

-Accept all default options. Reboot your system after the installation of packer.

-Install vagrant plugin now using this command vagrant plugin install vagrant-reload

Step 3: Install git client on your PC

Download and install 64-bit windows git executable from:https://git-scm.com/downloads. Accept all default options from the installer. You may have to reboot your machine at this point.

Step 4: Install Metasploitable3

-Run this command on command prompt: C:\Users\naveen\metasploitable3>git clone https://github.com/rapid7/metasploitable3.git

Step 5: Build Json Step

-Run this command C:\Users\naveen\metasploitable3>packer build –only=Virtualbox-iso \packer\templates\windows_2008_r2.json

This may take a couple of hours and you have to be patient with the installation process.

The installation process will reboot newly created VM few times.

Now add vagrant box after the installation using below command C:\Users\naveen\metasploitable3>vagrant box add .\packer\builds\windows_2008_r2_virtualbox_0.1.0.box –name=metasploitable3-win2k8

Hooray, finally the fruit of your laborcome to fruition. Head to VirtualBox and you will notice a new Windows 2008 VM. You find two users here: administrator and vagrant (see below screen shot). Password for both the account is vagrant. Enjoy hacking Windows 2008 Server!

Useful Links

• https://packer.io/downloads.html
• https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html
• https://www.virtualbox.org/
• https://github.com/rapid7/metasploitable3
• https://github.com/rapid7/metasploitable3/wiki/Vulnerabilities
• https://github.com/rapid7/metasploitable3/blob/master/README.md

Author :

I have more than 10 years’ experience in Security Engineering, Cyber Security Management, and architecture of secure solutions. In my spare time, I practice Yoga and learn the science of Ayurveda.