Windows and Linux Penetration Testing from Scratch - Second Edition

Chapter 10: Shellcoding - The Stack

Up to this point, we’ve been working from a fairly high level of abstraction. We’ve reviewed some great tools for getting work done efficiently and learned how to easily generate reports in easy-to-digest formats. Despite this, there is a wall that will halt our progress if we stay above the murky lower layers, and constantly allow tools to hide the underlying machine. Regardless of the task we’re doing, packets and application data eventually work their way down to raw machine data. We learned this earlier while working with networking protocols, such as when a tool tells you that a destination is unreachable. While that may be true, it’s pretty meaningless when you want to know what happened to those bits ...