Exploitation is the phase where identified vulnerabilities are actively abused to gain unauthorized access, execute code, or escalate privileges within a target environment.
The objective is to reliably convert confirmed weaknesses into practical access, while maintaining control, stability, and situational awareness throughout the engagement.
This section focuses on practical exploitation techniques, emphasizing understanding exploit conditions, payload behavior, and post-exploitation positioning rather than blind tool usage.
This section contains distilled notes from my Hack The Box – Pentesting Path study.
Full repository (expanded notes, diagrams, screenshots):
https://github.com/lameiro0x/pentesting-path-htb
Service Attacks Overview Attacking common services is about understanding how organizations expose file sharing, databases, remote access, and email workflows. These services often sit on predictable ports and accept standard authentication methods, which makes them ideal targets during exploitation. The goal is to validate access, enumerate data, and identify misconfigurations that expose sensitive information. A clean workflow documents what you tested, how you authenticated, and what the impact is.
Most service attacks follow the same pattern: identify the service, test authentication and permissions, then pivot to protocol specific abuse. If you can list shares, execute queries, or establish remote sessions, you can usually expand into credential harvesting or lateral movement. Many attacks are not exotic, they are simply weak credentials or unsafe defaults. This is why strong enumeration and careful validation matter more than running random exploits.
...