Hikers living off the land make use of existing nutrients and water sources to survive in the wilderness. In hacker parlance, the term “survive in the wilderness” means they cover their tracks and make use of tools and code that already exist on targeted endpoints. This hides their exploits by making them look like common administrative tasks so that detection tools can’t easily find them. Welcome to the world of PowerShell-based attacks.
PowerShell has deep roots in the DOS command line that came with the first IBM PCs back in the 1980s and the .NET universe. It is now the default command shell that is packaged in the current Windows 10 version.
