Useful Tips

Here are some tips to help you get the most out of post-exploitation concepts, tools, and utilities:

• Use hostname and whoami commands

• Use uname -a

• Make cat /proc/version to get more information about OS

• Make cat /etc/issue to know OS information

• Make ps -A to show running processes on the current shell (ps axjf for tree display mode)

• Use env to see environment variables

• Use id to obtain information about users and groups, or even info about another user

• Use ls -la to check hidden files

• Make cat /etc/passwd | cur -d ":" -f 1 or cat /etc/passwd | grep "home" to know existing users

• Check the last used commands with history

• Check network interfaces with ifconfig to know if it could be a pivoting point to another network. Then use ip route to confirm an interface cannot be accessed directly by the machine (it won't say it is a default interface).

• Use netstat to obtain information about listening ports and services running.

• Search for specific files with find

• Use tools such as linpeas or linenum for automatization of the process

• Use dpkg -l on Linux or look at C:\Program Files in Windows to see what software is installed on the system.

• Check for exposed credentials on configuration files of web apps or containers.

• Check if there are write permissions to add new cron jobs in the /etc/crontab, /etc/cron.d, or /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root folders to gain privileged shells or execute exploits.

• Use base64 encode to convert a file to base64 format, and pass it in this way to a remote host to evade filtering of file types. To encode we use base64 $file -w 0 and to decode it with echo $encodedstring | base64 -d > $file

• Check the kernel version to find any possible exploit

• Use the sudo -l command to check sudo execution permissions and environment options

• Check executables with SUID or SGID permissions

• Check which binaries have capabilities assigned

• Check which cronjobs are programmed to be executed

• Check cronjobs that may be deleted from the system but not from crontab

• Check writable folders that can be vulnerable to abuse of PATH environment variable

• Check NFS configuration files to create a connection with the host machine