The Metasploit Framework
I am currently taking the SANS 504 course Hacker Techniques, Exploits & Incident Handling but this is not the first course of this type I have taken. The unique thing about this particular course is that it taught by Ed Skoudis, a recognized industry expert in the field of Information Security Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing. He mentioned, during one of the lectures, an opensource framework called Metasploit that is a development platform for creating security tools and exploits. The framework is used by network security professionals to perform penetration tests, system administrators to verify patch installations, product vendors to perform regression testing, and security researchers.
The Metasploit opensource project is located here.
The Metasploit Framework is located here.
