Book Image

Offensive Shellcode from Scratch

By : Rishalin Pillay
5 (1)
Book Image

Offensive Shellcode from Scratch

5 (1)
By: Rishalin Pillay

Overview of this book

Shellcoding is a technique that is executed by many red teams and used in penetration testing and real-world attacks. Books on shellcode can be complex, and writing shellcode is perceived as a kind of "dark art." Offensive Shellcode from Scratch will help you to build a strong foundation of shellcode knowledge and enable you to use it with Linux and Windows. This book helps you to explore simple to more complex examples of shellcode that are used by real advanced persistent threat (APT) groups. You'll get to grips with the components of shellcode and understand which tools are used when building shellcode, along with the automated tools that exist to create shellcode payloads. As you advance through the chapters, you'll become well versed in assembly language and its various components, such as registers, flags, and data types. This shellcode book also teaches you about the compilers and decoders that are used when creating shellcode. Finally, the book takes you through various attacks that entail the use of shellcode in both Windows and Linux environments. By the end of this shellcode book, you'll have gained the knowledge needed to understand the workings of shellcode and build your own exploits by using the concepts explored.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
1
Section 1: Shellcode
5
Section 2: Writing Shellcode
8
Section 3: Countermeasures and Bypasses

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the debuggers and tools that can be used when creating shellcode for Linux. Compared to Windows, here we are using all command-line interface (CLI) tools, which ultimately make it a lot more lightweight when developing shellcode for Linux. We spent some time understanding the fundamental and key components of the Linux ELF structure. You then learned the thought process around creating shellcode by starting with a basic shell, moving onto egg hunters, reverse TCP shellcode, and finally, shellcode for 64-bit operating systems. The structure went from basic to complex, allowing you to see how shellcode can evolve and the ability to build complex shellcode for Linux.

In the next chapter, we will look at the countermeasures that are deployed within Windows and Linux and the various bypasses that exist for them.