Take away the Tools

Indi303 recently had a post on twitter

Dear pentester: Throw away metasploit.... are u still a hacker? If you make excuses about why u are,but need it.. you aren't

It seems like a lot of people did not understand what he was saying, which rather proves the point I think.  He is not saying that Pen Tester should not use Metasploit, or that tools are bad. What he is saying here is that knowing how to use tools does not make you a good pentester. It makes you a script kiddie. We have been interviewing candidates for two new PenTest positions at my work, and I can tell you I feel this keenly.

During our in-person panel interview we ask a long series of questions designed to gauge depth. We ask a number of basic questions. These first sets of questions we are jsut looking for typical responses. These questions can range from simple things like: "how does traceroute actually work" or "What is ring0" to more complex questions like "How do you exploit Blind SQL Injection on Oracle" or "Name two places besides the saved return pointer that you could overwrite to control program execution". The results we have seen on these questions alone are somewhat disappointing and very mixed.

Then we get to where the wheels always seem to come off. This is where we ask the candidates to actually demonstrate the things they have claimed knowledge of. We ask things like "Write out an HTTP GET request on the whiteboard". Some of you are probably saying to yourselves "That is simple". I would agree, and yet no candidate has done it correctly yet. We draw out a URL with GET parameters and ask them "Rewrite this request with a blind SQL injection attack".

The fact is that when asked to demonstrate these skills and knowledge disciplines outside the context of any sort of tool or crutch. One of my colleagues across the wall, in Incident Response land, has suggested that I am being too harsh. That people who can only use tools still have some value. He is right, as far as it goes. what happens though, when you have secured the environment past the point where you can just run metasploit modules and pop boxes. When you need to find design flaws, or 0days to exploit systems. A click-monkey is of no real value there, except maybe fetching coffee.


none of this means you should throw your tools away. Metasploit is a valuable tool and a framework for pentesting.  Those of you who know me, of course know, that when i find something Metasploit doesn't do that I want it to, i try and add it.  So while I can operate without Metasploit, and have to often, i try and continually reduce those occurrence by submitting enhancements to Metasploit. In this way I am also giving back to the community. Something i would encourage EVERY pentester to do: If you see something Metasploit should do, but doesn't, write it and submit it!

Or at least open up a feature request on their Redmine interface.