Summary

In this chapter, we discovered ways of maintaining our access to the target systems once we’ve established ourselves on the network. This gives us more time to gather information and potentially deepen the compromise. We learned that modern threats are persistent, and so having these techniques in our repertoire as pen testers increases the value of the assessment to the client. We generated msfvenom payloads while explaining how to use more sophisticated payloads with these persistence tools. After exploring the persistence capabilities of both Metasploit and PowerShell Empire, we looked at quick and easy persistent backdoor building with netcat and Meterpreter Finally, we demonstrated the persistence module of the PowerSploit framework by taking a script and embedding it in code that persists the payload on the target.

If you’re still awake, congratulations – you’ve made it to the end of our journey! But as I’ve said before, we’...