Chapter 17: Maintaining Access

We’ve been on a long journey together through these chapters. It’s fitting that we end up here, asking the remaining question after you’ve forced your way in and proven there’s a gap in the client’s defense – how do I keep my access? This is a funny question because it’s often neglected, despite its importance. When a lot of people talk about hacking computers, they think about the excitement of working your way up to breaking open the door. Hacking is problem solving, and sometimes it’s easy to forget that being able to persist our access is a problem in its own right. In the context of penetration testing in particular, persistence can be easily taken for granted because we’re often working on tight schedules. Sometimes, it seems like there’s a race to get domain admin or root, and then we just stop there to wrap up the report. It’s a shame that assessments are often...