The Heartbleed bug is a serious vulnerability that was found to exist on webservers using the OpenSSL cryptographic library, a popular implementation of the TLS protocol for webservers. This exploit will work on any unpatched webservers running an OpenSSL instance in either client or server mode. The vulnerability was disclosed in 2014, although the bug was found to have been present since a software patch in September 2012. It allows attackers to perform a buffer overflow attack, where they can read more information than they should be allowed to and can, therefore, read the entire contents of a webserver's memory buffer - an area where the server stores data ready for processing or that is yet to be overwritten by other processes. This could include passwords, key strings, hashes and all manner of other sensitive information that other users are inputting onto the server during normal use.

In this lab, you will perform the Heartbleed attack using the MetaSploit Framework in order to dump the contents of a vulnerable webserver using an unpatched version of OpenSSL.