Getting something of one’s own to run¶

Access becomes capability at the moment a machine runs code that was not its own, and two questions decide how that goes: how the code arrives, and what comes back once it does. A payload folded into an image that an agent fetches on a schedule answers the first. A listener waiting on the attacking side, so the connection is made outward through a firewall that was only ever configured to worry about inward ones, answers the second.

Neither is subtle by nature. Both are quiet only to the extent that the arrival looks like traffic the estate already carries.