Now that we've learned how to gain access to our target, let's look at what we can do with that target. In this section, we will learn a number of things that can be done after we have gained access to a computer. We will look at what to do with a computer regardless of how we gain access to it—whether we use a server-side exploit, social engineering, a backdoor, a problem with a certain application, or some other method.

In the previous chapters, we always stopped when we got to a reverse Meterpreter session from our target. In this chapter, we are going to start with a Meterpreter session. We're not going to discuss how we gained access, but what we can do after gaining access. We will be discussing some really cool things, such as how to maintain access to a target computer even if its user uninstalls the vulnerable program or restarts the computer. We will look at how to download, upload, and read files, open the webcam, start the keylogger to register keystrokes, and so on. We will also look at how to use a target computer as a pivot to exploit all computers on the same network (supposing that, for example, our target isn't actually the computer that we hacked, but is on the same network as that computer). Again, all of the things that we will do in this chapter will focus on after we have exploited a target's vulnerabilities and have gained access to it.