Exploitation

See Command Injections for the detection and table of possible separators

Injecting Commands

We can add a semi-colon after our input IP 127.0.0.1, and then append our command (e.g. whoami), such that the final payload we will use is (127.0.0.1; whoami), and the final command to be executed would be:

ping -c 1 127.0.0.1; whoami

Other Injection Operators

Such operators can be used for various injection types, like SQL injections, LDAP injections, XSS, SSRF, XML, etc. We have created a list of the most common operators that can be used for injections:

Injection Type	Operators
SQL Injection	' , ; -- /* */
Command Injection	; &&
LDAP Injection	* ( ) & |
XPath Injection	' or and not substring concat count
OS Command Injection	; & |
Code Injection	' ; -- /* */ $() ${} #{} %{} ^
Directory Traversal/File Path Traversal	../ ..\\ %00
Object Injection	; & |
XQuery Injection	' ; -- /* */
Shellcode Injection	\x \u %u %n
Header Injection	\r %0d %0a %09

Keep in mind that this table is incomplete, and many other options and operators are possible. It also highly depends on the environment we are working with and testing.

For more on advanced command injections, like indirect injections or blind injection, you may refer to the Whitebox Pentesting 101: Command Injection (Hack the Box) module, which covers advanced injections methods and many other topics.