Metasploit has upgraded its website and released the second beta release of the 3.0 tree, for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and Windows using MSF’s custom Cygwin installer. As we reported this month, Metasploit downloads run heavily in favor of Windows – in July 2006, 41,000 people downloaded the Windows edition of MSF v 2.6, while 4,900 downloaded the Unix/Linux edition. With open source projects such as this one, distinguishing actual users from the merely curious is very difficult, but one good method is to count as users those signed up to receive online updates. As of July 2006, that number was 48,000.

This release marks the first time that the Subversion repository for the Metasploit Framework has been made public, allowing users of Beta 2 to synchronize with the live development tree. This should prompt some colorful security discussions!

An important design element on metasploit.com is the BRUTE-created icon at the top left; as we reported in our MIS service, the new MSF license prohibits monetization of MSF. So to keep the MSF developers in Happy Hacker Keyboards, MSF is going to be selling tee shirts, posters and the like over the next year. I’m buying somethin’ for sure.