📰 Originally published on Securityelites — AI Red Team Education — the canonical, fully-updated version of this article.
🐉 KALI LINUX MASTERY
FREE
Part of the Kali Linux 180-Day Course
Day 28 of 180 · 15% complete
⚠️ Authorised systems only. Everything in this lesson runs against your own Metasploitable virtual machine on an isolated host-only network. Point Armitage at a machine you do not own or have written permission to test and you are committing a crime in most countries — not a grey area, an actual offence under computer-misuse law. Build the lab, attack the lab.
You already know msfconsole. On Kali Linux Day 10 we fired our first exploit, and on Day 27 we built payloads with msfvenom. So here’s the honest question — why would I hand you a GUI now? Because the day you’re staring at forty hosts and three teammates all working the same network, a wall of console tabs stops being power and starts being chaos. Armitage is the map you draw over Metasploit so you can actually see the fight. Let me show you when it helps and, just as important, when it lies to you.
🎯 What you’ll master in Day 28
Stand up the Metasploit database and an Armitage team server the way a real engagement crew does
Scan an authorised target into the visual graph and read what the icons are actually telling you
Match modules to services with Find Attacks — and understand why it over-promises
Land a Meterpreter session on Metasploitable and drive post-exploitation from the GUI
Pivot through your first host into a second subnet, visually
⏱ ~30 min read · 3 hands-on exercises · Kali + Metasploitable lab Before you start you’ll want: Kali up to date, the Metasploit basics from Day 10, your msfvenom payloads from Day 27 fresh in mind, and a Metasploitable 2 VM running on a host-only network. If that VM isn’t up yet, go build it first — the rest of this won’t work without a target. ### Armitage Tutorial – Table of Contents 1. What Armitage actually is (and isn’t) 2. Starting the database and team server 3. Connecting Armitage and reading the interface 4. Scanning your target into the graph 5. Find Attacks — and why it over-promises 6. Working the Meterpreter session 7. Pivoting to a second subnet 8. The Hail Mary trap Here’s where we are in the course. You’ve spent twenty-seven days building a toolkit one blade at a time — recon, scanning, cracking, and the framework that ties exploitation together. Today isn’t a new weapon. It’s a lens. And I want you thinking critically about it from the first click, because a GUI that makes hacking feel easy is exactly the kind of thing that gets beginners into trouble.
What Armitage actually is (and isn’t)
Let me clear up the biggest misconception before you download anything. Armitage is not a hacking tool in its own right. It doesn’t have a single exploit inside it. Every attack it launches, every session it opens, every payload it delivers — all of that is Metasploit doing the work underneath. Armitage is a graphical console that talks to a running Metasploit instance over a network connection and draws you a picture of what’s happening. Think of it as the cockpit, not the engine.
I’m telling you this on purpose, because you’re going to see people online treat Armitage like a magic button. It isn’t. If you don’t understand what msfconsole is doing — and you do, because you’ve spent two days in it — the GUI will happily hide the one detail that would have told you why an exploit failed. That’s the trade. You get a map and a team view; you give up a little visibility into the plumbing.
So when does the map earn its keep? Two situations, mainly. The first is scale: when you’ve scanned a network and you’re looking at twenty, forty, a hundred hosts, a visual graph where compromised machines light up red is genuinely faster to reason about than scrolling hosts and sessions -l in a terminal. The second is collaboration — and this is the part almost every tutorial skips.
💡 The honest verdict up front: Armitage is no longer actively developed by its original author, Raphael Mudge, but it still ships in Kali and still drives a current Metasploit Framework. You’ll hit the occasional rough edge. None of it changes the workflow you’re about to learn, and the concepts — team server, visual targeting, module matching — carry straight over to its commercial descendant, Cobalt Strike, which you’ll meet much later in your red-team days.
Starting the database and team server
You’re about to see why I made you comfortable with the console first. Armitage needs two things running before it’ll even open: the PostgreSQL database that Metasploit stores everything in, and a team server for Armitage to connect to. Miss either and you’ll get an error that tells you almost nothing. Let’s do it in the right order so you never see that error.
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