In the previous chapter, we covered some of the command-line tools that handle target enumeration on the network. In this chapter, we're going to look at a collection of tools that enable you to perform activities such as reverse engineering and backdooring hosts, and we will also cover ways to integrate powerful tools such as the Metasploit exploitation framework and bash scripting.

In addition, we will cover a collection of tools in this chapter that may enable you to discover memory corruption, code injection, and general data- or file-handling flaws that may be used to instantiate arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities.

Every vulnerability discovered everywhere at some point involves reverse engineering. When someone figures out how to exploit a given behavior—in a piece of code—it means this person has, to some extent, detailed the nuances of the given behavior and used this knowledge to take advantage of it. This process is called reverse...