As penetration testers, it’s crucial to identify what types of attacks are detected and what’s not. After running into a recent penetration test with a next generation firewall, most analysis has shifted away from the endpoints and more towards network analysis. While there needs to be a mixture of both, MeterSSH demonstrates how easy it is to circumvent a lot of these signature based “next generation” product lines.

MeterSSH is an easy way to inject native shellcode into memory and pipe anything over SSH to the attacker machine through an SSH tunnel and all self contained into one single Python file. Python can easily be converted to an executable using pyinstaller or py2exe.

MeterSSH is easy – simply edit the meterssh.py file and add your SSH server IP, port, username, and password and run the script. It will spawn meterpreter through memory injection (in this case a windows/meterpreter/bind_tcp) and bind to port 8021. Paramiko (python SSH module) is used to tunnel meterpreter over 8021 and back to the attacker and all communications tucked within that SSH tunnel.