The attacks illustrated in the previous chapter used the Meterpreter payload. Meterpreter is a payload created as part of the Metasploit project. Meterpreter is an interactive shell that allows an attacker to execute a range of commands on a target and view the results. On Windows, Meterpreter is memory-resident, so it does not write to the disk. It runs within existing processes and does not need to create a new process. Provided the attacker has sufficient privileges, Meterpreter can migrate from one process to another; these features are designed to make Meterpreter stealthy and harder for defenders to identify. Meterpreter is extensible and can load extensions while running in a target.