Chapter 9: Advanced Network Penetration Testing — Post Exploitation

The exploitation phase of penetration testing focuses on gaining access to your target, such as a vulnerable host on a network. However, while the exploitation phase will seem like a victory, remember that as a penetration tester, your objective is to discover known and hidden security vulnerabilities within an organization's network and their assets. After exploiting a system or network, performing post-exploitation techniques will allow you to gather sensitive data such as users' login credentials and password hashes, impersonate high-privilege users on the network to gain access to other systems and servers, perform lateral movement to go deeper into restricted areas of the network, and use pivoting techniques to perform host discovery and exploitation through a compromised host.

During the course of this chapter, you will discover how to perform various post-exploitation techniques using Meterpreter...