As described on their official GitHub repository, Empire is a post-exploitation framework that includes a pure-PowerShell2.0 Windows agent, and a pure Python 2.6/2.7 Linux/OS X agent.
It is a merge of the previous PowerShell Empire and Python EmPyre projects. The framework offers cryptologically secure communications and flexible architecture.
It has the ability to run PowerShell agents without powershell.exe. It has lots of post-exploitation modules for data exfiltration and privilege escalation as well. The whole process of using the Empire framework can be defined in five phases, which are shown in the following diagram:
In this recipe, we will learn about the setup and basic usage of Empire.