Instructor: And, welcome back.
Time to touch on a subject of post exploitation.
We have traveled a long way from the beginning.
We covered the information gathering,
where we try to get as much information about our target
that we would find useful for a future attack.
After it, we scanned our target from technical aspect
and we discovered its open ports and softwares that it runs.
We then used different tools to figure out
whether that target has any known vulnerability
that we might be able to exploit,
and then we exploited many different targets
from Linux Metasploitable to Windows 7 and Windows 10.
We both saw how to exploit its vulnerabilities,
and then after it recreated our own payloads
that we executed on the target system.
Now comes the part after the exploitation.
What are we going to do
now that we are on the target system?
What are we looking for and what cool things can we even do?
Well, we have lots and lots of options
depending on what we want to find of course.
For example, the most simple thing we can do is scroll
through their file system,
and look through what files and programs
they have on their machine.
Maybe we could find something interesting,
such as saved passwords inside of a file,
or some other important files for that company
that are laying on that machine unprotected.
We could also download files from that machine
and also upload files to it,
in case we want to send another payload
or another executable that we want to run on their system.
We can do all of this with our Meterpreter shell,
just by running a few commands.
Talking about passwords,
that is also something that we would look for.
We could try to extract saved passwords from browsers,
for example, remember when you click on that button
that says Remember Me once you log into some webpage?
Well, those passwords could be stored
somewhere on their machine.
"And why would we go for passwords?"
you might be asking.
Well, getting targets' online accounts
just expands our access to them.
Imagine you were to get their PayPal password
and gain access to their PayPal account.
That wouldn't be so pretty for them,
since you will have access to all of their funds.
Another thing we could try to do
is gain access to the entire network
from the target machine that we hacked.
Maybe inside of company's network,
you managed to get access to one machine,
but it doesn't have all the things you might need.
Maybe some important files could be on some other machine
from that same network.
In that case,
you would want to try to hack that other machine,
from the machine that you already hacked.
Now, you might be wondering,
"Well, why not from our Kali Linux machine?"
Well, maybe machines that belong to that network
have more trust between one another.
Maybe they exchange files
or communicate with some other software altogether
on that same network.
In that sense, it would be easier to get access
to one of those machines from a system
that is already inside of their network, right?
Maybe we would also want to run a keylogger
on the machine we got access to.
Now, keylogger is a program
that captures every keyboard input from that machine.
So with this, not only we could maybe capture
some passwords that the user of that machine
would input in some secured website or software,
but we will also be able to see everything else
that he or she typed
from what they searched on the Internet,
to maybe the messages that they're sending on social media
from that machine,
or basically anything that they type in the keyboard,
we will be able to see it.
Amazing, right?
You can picture post exploitation
as some type of a information gathering
on the target system.
And these things that we talked about
are just a small portion of what we can do
once we hack a machine.
Now that we've briefly talked about
post exploitation theory,
let us see what available tools and commands we can use
to achieve all of the things that we mentioned
and even more.
See you in the next video.