Gaining Access
An exploit is a program that takes advantage of a vulnerability that is on a device. Exploits can be either remote or client‐side. A remote exploit will be the type that will focus on services running on network‐connected machines that you have decided to target. A client‐side exploit is the type of exploit that takes advantage of vulnerability in software you have installed on a computer system. There are software packages that have a reputation for being vulnerable even after you run a patch on them. I have experienced the frustration of patching systems, running a vulnerability scan, and then finding the patch I just used has a vulnerability.
If you look at the data your first scan retrieved by navigating to the Overview page, you will see there are four quadrants. So far, I have done only a discovery scan to try to figure out what is running on my network. As you see in Figure 10.10, the initial scan returned 7 hosts and 26 services with 0 vulnerabilities...