Gaining access

We can now get started with exploitation, which is the most exciting phase of the penetration testing life cycle. We have already identified our potential exploits on our target systems; therefore, we now need to run and test these exploits to gain our initial foothold.

The objective of the exploitation phase is to gain stable and persistent access to the target system, which will ensure that once a system is exploited, we will have persistent access even if the system is restarted.

Exploiting Metasploitable3

In the previous section, we were able to identify and verify the EternalBlue exploit as a potential access vector inside the Metasploitable3 host. Let's take a look at how we can use this exploit to gain access:

1. The first step is to fire up msfconsole and search for the EternalBlue exploit module by running the following command:

   search eternalblue

2. The module we will use is the exploit module named exploit/windows/smb/ms17_010_eternalblue...