When conducting a web application penetration test there are times when you want to be able to pivot through a system to which you have gained access, to other systems in order to continue testing. Usually during a penetration test or security assessment, depending, of course, of the strategy used during this work that could be started with an external network often with research and pentesting of machines and services available from the global network, this phase of the discovery is called Reconnaissance, many times we can see, that attempts are being made to find a security hole and, if it succeeds, then a penetration into the local network is performed in order to capture as many systems as possible. Local network traffic is non-routable, that is, other computers that are physically connected to this network can access the resources of the local network, and the attacker cannot access them. So, Pivoting is a set of techniques that allow an attacker to gain access to local resources, in essence, making traffic routable that is normally non-routable, during a Penetration Test, this phase called Post Exploitation.
Pivoting helps an attacker to configure the working environment to use the tools in such a way as if he were in the organization’s local network, that is, using pivoting is achieved, you can get access to local resources and the ability to use tools to scan and search for vulnerabilities from your computer in a remote local network, as if they were installed right there, so, hacker tools gain access to the local network, which under normal conditions is impossible for non-routable traffic.
