Living Off the Land: A Minimalist’s Guide to Windows Post-Exploitation

Two of the biggest challenges of long-term penetration tests are advanced security products and active administrators. Host intrusion prevention, application white-listing and antivirus software are all looking for your tools. Administrators and network defenders are doing everything they can to find you. Surprisingly, the easiest way to hide from them and homestead in a Windows enterprise is to live off the land. Microsoft provides you with all the tools you need to get into a network and live there forever. Tools such as Wmic, Netsh and PowerShell are well-known to administrators, but they also provide an attacker a whole range of virtually untapped features. By simply leveraging PowerSploit and a few tricks you can reliably bypass antivirus, get around whitelisting, escalate privileges, redirect network traffic, take full packet captures, log keystrokes, take screenshots, dump hashes, persist and pivot to other hosts all without introducing a single binary!

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