Penetration Testing

Chapter 8. Exploitation

After all that preparatory work we finally get to the fun stuff: exploitation. In the exploitation phase of the pentest, we run exploits against the vulnerabilities we have discovered to gain access to target systems. Some vulnerabilities, such as the use of default passwords, are so easy to exploit, it hardly feels like exploitation at all. Others are much more complicated.

In this chapter we’ll look at exploiting the vulnerabilities we identified in Chapter 6 to gain a foothold in target machines. We’ll return to our friend MS08-067 from Chapter 4, now that we have more background about the vulnerability. We’ll also exploit an issue in the SLMail POP3 server with a Metasploit module. In addition, we’ll piggyback on a previous ...