Summary

In this chapter, we explored PowerShell from two perspectives. First, we introduced PowerShell as an interactive task management command-line utility and as a scripting language. Then, we leveraged PowerShell scripts built into the PowerShell Empire attack framework as a way of demonstrating the potential when attacking Windows machines. Ultimately, we learned how to leverage a foothold on a Windows machine using built-in functionality to prepare for later stages of the attack.

This introduction is an ideal segue into the concepts of privilege escalation and persistence, where we’ll turn our foothold into a fully privileged compromise and pave the way to maintain our access to facilitate the project in the long term. For now, we’ll jump into the next chapter where we introduce shellcoding and take a crash course in manipulating the stack.