Post-Exploitation Techniques

During the exploitation phase of the Cyber Kill Chain, ethical hackers and penetration testers focus on taking advantage of potential security vulnerabilities that were identified during the reconnaissance phase with the intent to determine whether the security vulnerability exists on the targeted system or not. However, while the exploitation phase may seem like a victory for aspiring ethical hackers, keep in mind that the objective is to discover known and hidden security flaws that may exist on the organization’s assets.

After exploiting a targeted system or network, performing post-exploitation techniques enables penetration testers to gather sensitive information such as users’ log-on credentials and password hashes, impersonate high-privilege user accounts to gain access to other systems, perform lateral movement to go deeper and expand their foothold into hidden areas of the network, and use pivoting techniques to perform host...