M E T E R P R E T E R

In this chapter, we’ll dive deeper into this “hacker’s 
Swiss army knife” that can significantly improve your 
post exploitation experience. Meterpreter is one of 
the flagship products in Metasploit and is leveraged as 
a payload after a vulnerability is exploited. A 

payload

 is 

the information returned to us when we trigger an 

exploit. For example, when we exploit a weakness in a Remote Procedure 
Call (RPC), trigger the exploit, and select Meterpreter as the payload, we 
would be given a Meterpreter shell to the system. Meterpreter is an extension 
of the Metasploit Framework that allows us to leverage Metasploit’s function-
ality and further compromise our target. Some of this functionality includes 
ways to cover your tracks, reside purely in memory, dump hashes, access 
operating systems, pivot, and much more.

In this chapter, we’ll leverage normal attack methods within Metasploit 

to compromise a Windows XP machine. Our payload, Meterpreter, will allow 
us to perform additional attacks after we’ve compromised the system.