Password cracking can really be fun, but dumping passwords from memory of a compromised host is much quicker. This will give you quick access to credentials that can allow you to either elevate your privileges or move laterally in the environment. Some systems might be configured with wdigest authentication, which will provide you with clear text passwords, while others might be more secure, which you can then leverage as a pass the hash attack.
Let's take a look at some possibilities of dumping passwords from memory. We will use what we have learned in the previous chapter (Chapter 5, Diving into the Metasploit Framework), and perform an exploit toward the Metasploitable 3 virtual machine using the eternalblue exploit. For the payload, we will leverage a meterpreter shell, as shown in the following screenshot:
