EmpireProject/Empire

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: archived

Adoption not part of the score

7863 stars · 2932 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Empire is a post-exploitation framework with a pure PowerShell Windows agent and a pure Python Linux/OS X agent, offering encrypted communications and deployable post-exploitation modules like keyloggers and Mimikatz. The project is no longer supported, with the last release in January 2020.

Use cases

• run a command and control server for red team operations
• deploy post-exploitation agents on windows and linux targets
• run powershell agents without powershell.exe
• collect credentials with mimikatz during penetration tests
• evade network detection with encrypted c2 communications
• log keystrokes on compromised hosts

When to choose

• you need a battle-tested C2 framework for authorized red team engagements and can accept an unmaintained codebase
• you want pure PowerShell or Python agents without touching powershell.exe
• you are studying offensive tooling or C2 architecture

When to avoid

• you need maintained software with security patches - the project is officially unsupported since 2020
• you need a modern C2 with current evasion capabilities against up-to-date defenders
• you want Python 3 support - Empire relies on Python 2.6/2.7
• you are doing defensive security work rather than authorized offensive testing

Facets

framework · maturity abandoned

security penetration-testing cryptography cli security penetration-testing windows python cli post-exploitation c2 red-team powershell command-and-control offensive-security unsupported command-line linux macos docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="EmpireProject/Empire")