Tooling

When most people think about computer hackers, they often think of a Hollywood depiction of a hacker persona in which they have all kinds of specialized hardware they are using and custom-crafted exploits they need for some exact purpose – something they have that no other person has. That may work for Hollywood, but the reality is that most threat actors are opportunistic, meaning they take what they can and are looking for the simplest methods to achieve their results.

This means that they will utilize the internal functionalities of an operating system, including its native command and scripting interpreters. This may include interpreters such as the Unix shell, PowerShell, and Windows Command Shell. They will also look at the native functionalities of applications to determine if they provide any scripting functionality. This means that they may be looking for Visual Basic, Python, JavaScript, or even any type of batch functionality.

When they can't achieve...