On Tuesday, Rapid7 released a free version of its commercial offering to the Metasploit Framework. This new Community Edition, rests on top of the framework many security professionals have grown to love over the years, but includes the easy to use interface and some basic features from the Metasploit Pro line.
The new release coincides with the two-year anniversary of Rapid7’s purchase of Metasploit. The aim of the new Community Edition is to offer enterprise customers usability, with a path to upgrade to commercial offerings if they choose. However, if they revert to the open source framework, that’s fine too.
Over the years, interest in Metasploit and what it can offer has grown in both the security and business side of the IT world. However, some corporate users have issues navigating the Metasploit Framework, but don’t need the cost of all of the features offered by the Pro version. For them, Rapid7 has trimmed things down some, while keeping to the overall goals of Metasploit, and offered Community Edition.
“Metasploit Framework users fall into two camps: first, there are security researchers and developers who want a powerful platform to build custom tools and processes. The command-line interface works very well for them today, and we continue to invest in this interface,” commented HD Moore, Rapid7’s CSO, and Metasploit chief architect.
“Second, Metasploit Framework is used by security and IT professionals to verify vulnerabilities and to conduct security assessments. For this group of users, the command-line console may not be the best fit. Metasploit Community Edition provides a much more accessible solution for this group – for free.”
In addition to the simple GUI, the Community Edition of Metasploit will include network discovery and fingerprinting, integration with other vulnerability scanners, such as Qualys, Nexpose, and Nmap, basic exploitation, and module browsing within the Metasploit Framework.
The community edition is available now from Rapid7.
As always the development and module production for the open source project will remain. In fact, it’s growing. The QA queue for modules and exploits has grown to the point that Rapid7 has had to hire people just to with it on its own.
