Working with FTP servers using Metasploit

The module we will be using for this demonstration is ftp_version.rb from scanners in the auxiliary section.

Scanning FTP services

Let us select the module using the use command and check what different options are required by the module for it to work:

We can see we have a number of modules to work with. However, for now, let us use the ftp_version module, as shown in the following screenshot:

To scan the entire network, let's set RHOSTS to 192.168.10.0/24 (0-255) and also increase the number of threads for a speedy operation:

Let's run the module and analyze the output:

We can see we have scanned the entire network and found two hosts running FTP services, which are TP-LINK FTP server and FTP Utility FTP server. So now that we know what services are running on the target, it will be easy for us to find any matching exploit if the version of these FTP services is vulnerable.

We can also see that some lines are displaying the progress of the scan and generating...