Target exploitation is one area that sets a penetration test apart from a vulnerability assessment. Now that vulnerabilities have been found, you will actually validate and take advantage of these vulnerabilities, by exploiting the system, in the hope of gaining full control or additional information and visibility into the targeted network, and the systems therein. This chapter will highlight and discuss practices and tools that are used to conduct real-world exploitation.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
In the Vulnerability research section, we will explain what areas of vulnerability research are crucial in order to understand, examine, and test the vulnerability before transforming it into a practical exploit code.
Second, we will point you to several exploit repositories that should keep you informed about the publicly available exploits and when to use them.
We will also illustrate the use of one of the infamous exploitation toolkits...