Cleaner exits

Metasploit is also responsible for making a much cleaner exit from the systems it has compromised. A custom-coded exploit, on the other hand, can crash the system while exiting its operations. Making a clean exit is indeed an essential factor in cases where we know that the service will not restart immediately.

Consider a scenario where we have compromised a web server, and while we were making an exit, the exploited application crashes. The scheduled maintenance time for the server is left over with 50 days' time. So, what do we do? Shall we wait for the next 50 odd days for the service to come up again, so that we can exploit it again? Moreover, what if the service comes back after being patched? We could only end up kicking ourselves. This also shows a clear sign of poor penetration testing skills. Therefore, a better approach would be to use the Metasploit framework, which is known for making much cleaner exits, as well as offering tons of post-exploitation functions, such as persistence, that can help maintain permanent access to the server.