Summary

This chapter explored the essential techniques of maintaining persistence and executing pivoting operations during pentesting, with a focus on utilizing the Bash shell. We began by examining the fundamentals of persistence, including methods to establish long-term access to compromised systems through cron jobs, startup scripts, and system service manipulation. The chapter then progressed to more sophisticated persistence techniques, providing pentesters with a comprehensive toolkit for ensuring continued access.

The latter half of this chapter shifted focus to network pivoting, starting with basic concepts and moving on to advanced strategies. Here, we covered how to implement port forwarding and tunneling mechanisms using SSH and other tools. This chapter concluded with a section on cleanup procedures, detailing methods you can use to erase command histories, manage logs, and minimize any digital footprints that are left during the testing process. Throughout this chapter...