Setting up C2 operations
As an aspiring ethical hacker and penetration tester, it is essential to learn and gain the skillset to use popular C2 tools to help you improve your penetration testing skills and strategies during a real-world exercise. Empire C2 is a framework widely used by red team personnel and malicious threat actors and is the tool we will consider in this chapter. Empire is a post-exploitation framework that enables penetration testers and red teamers to set up C2 operations during their penetration tests.
Currently, a security group known as BC Security (www.bc-security.org) is maintaining a forked version of the original PowerShell Empire framework known as Empire v5. BC Security has been providing updates and new features that allow penetration testers to perform never-before-seen techniques such as polymorphic payloads, stealthy C2 communication, memory-only execution, and living-off-the-land techniques during their live penetration tests on their customers...
