Automated penetration testing tools are a two edged sword: they make it easy to check for well known vulnerabilities on your network, but they can also be used by hackers to try to compromise any vulnerable machines on your network. More here

A good tool to start with is Fast-Track, a relatively new Python-based open-source project. Parts of Fast-Track rely on the Metasploit Framework , so as well as Fast-Track we’ll need to install that as well. In this How To we’ll be using a system running Ubuntu 9.10 – you may need to make adjustments if you are using a different Linux distro.