Post-Exploitation

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What Is Post-Exploitation?

Post-Exploitation is the phase of an offensive operation that begins after a system has been successfully compromised. It focuses on maintaining access, escalating privileges, exploring the environment, and advancing toward operational objectives — all while minimizing detection.

While exploitation gets you in the door, post-exploitation determines what you do once you’re inside.

This is where tradecraft separates seasoned operators from opportunistic attackers.

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Why Post-Exploitation Matters

For Red Teams, post-exploitation is where impact is demonstrated and objectives are fulfilled. It helps:

• Assess lateral movement paths and domain trust relationships
• Identify and extract sensitive data
• Simulate real-world attacker behavior
• Test the effectiveness of defensive monitoring and response
• Provide tangible evidence of business risk

Without post-exploitation, access is just a data point — not a story.

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Key Objectives of Post-Exploitation

Objective	Description
Privilege Escalation	Gain SYSTEM/root or domain admin
Persistence	Establish a foothold that survives reboots or resets
Credential Access	Dump hashes, tokens, or cleartext creds
Lateral Movement	Move from one host to another (workstation → server → domain controller)
Data Collection	Identify and extract documents, emails, databases, configs
Situational Awareness	Map the environment, users, domain trust, defenses

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Common Techniques

🔑 Credential Dumping

• mimikatz, lsass memory scraping, SAM extraction
• Token impersonation, Kerberoasting, DCSync (Impacket secretsdump.py)

🧱 Privilege Escalation

• SUID binaries (Linux), weak service permissions (Windows)
• UAC bypass, DLL hijacking, unquoted service paths
• Always look for whoami ≠ who needs to be

🧭 Lateral Movement

• psexec, WMI, WinRM, RDP, SMB
• Pivoting with SOCKS proxies (e.g., socks_proxy, Cobalt Strike beacon)

📥 Data Collection & Exfil

• Search for sensitive data: *.xlsx, *.docx, *.pst, .kdbx, .env
• Use exfil-safe methods (e.g., staged zips, DNS exfil, encoded HTTP posts)

🔄 Persistence

• Registry keys (Run, Winlogon, Scheduled Tasks)
• Service creation, WMI Event Consumers
• Userland persistence: malicious Office macros, login scripts, rc.local or crontabs

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OPSEC Considerations

This phase carries high risk of Blue Team detection:

• Avoid triggering AV/EDR via known tools or binary signatures
• Don’t beacon aggressively from newly compromised systems
• Clean up after escalations or dropped payloads
• Use in-memory execution, LotL techniques, and custom tooling

📌 Tip: Never assume your actions go unnoticed — plan for incident response simulation as part of your engagement.

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Example Workflow: Internal Network Post-Ex

1. Dump credentials using mimikatz or secretsdump.py.
2. Reuse creds to authenticate to a server via SMB/WinRM.
3. Enumerate domain membership and share permissions.
4. Identify and escalate to DA via token theft or delegation abuse.
5. Search for and extract sensitive documents from a file server.
6. Deploy lightweight persistence on a user machine for reentry.
7. Egress data through an encrypted C2 channel.

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Red Team Mindset

In post-exploitation, you’re not just a hacker — you’re an operator. Every action should answer:

• Does this bring me closer to the objective?
• Does this burn access or increase detection risk?
• Is there a stealthier or more effective way to achieve the same result?

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Conclusion

Post-exploitation is the most valuable — and most sensitive — phase of an offensive engagement. It’s where Red Teams earn their credibility by demonstrating impact, persistence, and precision without breaking things or getting caught.

It’s not just about where you go — it’s about how you got there, how quietly you moved, and what you left behind.

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