Hands-On Red Team Tactics

Payloads

A payload is a piece of code that is delivered to the target system or an application via an exploit to perform an act of our choice. Payloads can actually be divided into three main types: singles, stagers, and stages. These can be defined as follows:

• Singles: These payloads are standalone and are usually used to perform simple tasks, such as opening notepad.exe, adding a user, and so on.
• Stagers: This sets up a connection between the two systems, and then stages are downloaded by them to the victim's machine.
• Stages: These can be considered as a component of a payload, which provides different features and does not need to have a size limit. An example of this is Meterpreter.

As well as these, the other types of payloads are ...