Network Pivoting and Port Forwarding with Metasploit and Meterpreter
During penetration tests and red team operations, an initial compromised foothold often resides in a perimeter network (DMZ) or employee subnet. These dual-homed hosts can act as springboards (pivots) to reach isolated internal segments unreachable from your attack workstation. The Network Scenario Attacker Workstation: 10.0.0.5 Compromised Host (Dual-Homed Foothold): External NIC: 10.0.0.10 Internal Private Subnet NIC: 10.0.2.15 Internal Target Host (Isolated): 10.0.2.30 Step 1: Internal Subnet Discovery (arp_scanner) From your active Meterpreter session on the compromised host, discover live hosts on the internal 10.0.2.0/24 subnet using ARP requests: ...