Exploitation and post-exploitation

The exploitation phase involves taking advantage of the previously discovered vulnerabilities. This stage is the actual attack phase. In this phase, a penetration tester fires up exploits at the target vulnerabilities of a system to gain access. This phase is covered heavily throughout the book.

The post-exploitation phase is the latter phase of exploitation. This stage covers various tasks that we can perform on an exploited system, such as elevating privileges, uploading/downloading files, pivoting, and so on.

For more information on the processes involved during the exploitation phase, refer to: http://www.pentest-standard.org/index.php/Exploitation.

For more information on post-exploitation, refer to http://www.pentest-standard.org/index.php/Post_Exploitation.