Maintaining Access

We've been on a long journey together through these pages. It's fitting that we end up here, asking the remaining question when you've cracked your way in and proven there's a gap in the client's defense: how do I keep my access? This is a funny question because it's often neglected despite its importance. When a lot of people talk about hacking computers, they think about the excitement of working your way up to breaking open the door. Hacking is problem solving, and sometimes it's easy to forget that being able to persist our access is a problem in its own right. In the context of penetration testing in particular, persistence can be easily taken for granted because we're often working to tight schedules. It seems there's a race to get domain admin or get root, and we stop there to wrap up the report....