Moving Mimikatz Across Subnets via Clipboard

When performing penetration tests, you often need to transfer tools or files between your attacker machine and a compromised target. This can be particularly challenging if the attacker machine (Kali Linux) is on a different subnet and the target is unreachable via direct network connections. In such cases, using the clipboard and base64 can bypass network restrictions without relying on tools like proxychains or ligolo. I will show you how on this blog post.

Encoding

On your Kali Linux machine, you can encode the file you want to transfer (in this case, mimikatz.exe) to Base64 format and copy it to the clipboard using the following command:

base64 mimikatz.exe | xclip -selection clipboard

Explanation:

• base64 mimikatz.exe: Encodes the file mimikatz.exe in Base64 format.
• |: Pipes the encoded output to the next command.
• xclip -selection clipboard: Copies the piped content to the system clipboard.

If xclip is not installed, feel free to download via apt. It is pretty easy.

Here’s how it looks on Kali Linux: