“For many years Penetration Testers have relied on gaining shell access to remote systems in order to take ownership of network resources and enterprise owned assets. AntiVirus (AV) companies are becoming increasingly more aware of shell signatures and are therefore making it more and more difficult to compromise remote hosts. The current industry mentality seams to believe the answer is stealthier payloads and super-complex obfuscation techniques. I believe a more effective answer might lie in alternative attack methodologies involving authenticated execution of native Windows commands to accomplish the majority of shell reliant tasks common to most network level penetration tests. The techniques I will be discussing were developed precisely with this style of attack in mind. Using these new tools, I will demonstrate how to accomplish the same degree of network level compromise that has been enjoyed in the past with shell-based attack vectors, while avoiding detection from AV solutions and leaving little to no trace of presence on target systems. ”