To this point, we've talked about a Stager and a single payload being a
singles, and that allows us to be able to do one thing, be able to establish
a connection with a target system and have it communicate back to us.
Our Stager being the MSF Venom file that we created to be able to send it over
for the target and victim to find a way to run that file to be able to
communicate back to us at the MSF console.
Well, now we're starting to get a little bit more complex in our payload
activity.
And this is where we start getting into Stagers.
Now, yes, I give you the full definition as best as I can do because I'm
putting
it in my own words as to what a Stager is.
And that is entirely accurate because it is a larger and more feature-rich
payload
delivery mechanism.
But how do we get there?
Well, aside from being able to read it and know what the book definition is for
what a
Stages plural is, I'm going to kind of walk you through this a little bit and
give
you an idea of how this actually works.
Now, as we side over to our side screen here where we just lay everything, you
may notice the fancy dancing, a depth logo up the top.
Now, I have this up here for a very specific reason because you could see in
the address bar right there, the actual link to that particular PNG file that
contains
the a depth logo.
The reason I have this here is because let's say and pretend for just a moment
that that a debt logo dot PNG actually has malicious code embedded in it.
So it was created as a PNG and then was injected with as a venom to run
multiple
operations could be that from the addendum where we created the net user Eric
and
whatever you decided to do with that information on your own is embedded inside
of this PNG.
Now we're not going to get into that in particular.
We're just going to talk about being able to deliver these multiple stages.
And just for clarification, this PNG does not contain any malicious activity
whatsoever,
but we do cover virus total and a couple of other mechanisms for you to be able
to avoid this and patch up those vulnerabilities.
So stay in touch in the course and we will get there for that verification.
Now, I'm going to zoom out and pop back over to our Kelly box here as we log in
.
And I already have it staged, if you will, inside of MSF console.
Now, I'm going to show you a couple of things here real quick.
First and foremost is is that we have the command here, which will be below.
But I also have on the left here.
So you got way there's nothing on my sleeves except my arms that have been
really tan from doing a lot of yard work here lately.
Yeah, I'm talking about here.
I'm one of the few nerds with a tan that works in a skiff.
In our share folder that we have mounted to be able to pass files back and
forth
from Kelly to Windows, you could see the file listing.
And here there's nothing else in here as far as PNG goes.
So looking at our command here, we're using our singles and our stages and our
singles to combine their powers into allowing us to be able to bring more stuff
over for multi payloads because remember in pretend world that have let
debt logo has a payload within it.
And we'll talk about how we do that later in different skill.
But here you can see that I'm invoking sessions from our previous portion of
the
skill using PowerShell to run curl.
Now, I know it says see Earl because of the word wrap, but again, come here
below.
Dasho logo PNG, which is telling it what the file is going to be named after we
curl it.
Curl is basically a command line tool for us to be able to pull individual
files
from the internet without having to go and right click and do all this other
stuff.
We could do it in command shell or PowerShell.
So that way it goes a little bit faster.
And then we quotation marks the actual link of where the PNG is at or target
file.
Now you may notice too that there's two quotation marks on the end of this.
And that's because we have to close each quotation mark we use.
And we're still assigning it to the same session that we're currently in, which
is
session three.
Now, when I look when I do this, I'm going to hit enter and it's going to run
inside
of PowerShell.
And now I'm going to zoom in for you here right there and show you that logo.
png
is now in the shared folder on the Windows system.
At this point, you're now creating stages because you're able to send other
payloads to the target system to be able to counteract the just in case that
single
payload doesn't work.
Or you want to do different things because you'll notice inside as we continue
throughout the course, MSF, Venom and MSF console, there are multiples payloads
.
Just here, for instance, I can say show payloads and you get a long list of
them.
In fact, if you look at the listing itself, you'll notice there are currently
1,671 different payloads. So using those different types of payloads and
injecting
them into different types of things and being able to send them to the same
system
in multiple different ways is how we generally create our stages.
And that's the combination of having a stage yours in the beginning, a singles.
And then we're putting it all together to create multiple opportunities for
multiple payloads to infect or excuse me to be on the target system because
we're pen testers, not hackers, right?