Which statement best describes Metasploit payloads that reside in memory and disappear on reboot?

• A. They run as a separate process on the target.
• B. They write a persistent loader to disk.
• C. They load as a DLL into the target process memory.
• D. They reside in memory and disappear after reboot.

Answer: (D)

Memory-resident, non-persistent payloads are loaded into the target’s RAM and do not write artifacts to disk. Because nothing is stored on disk and memory is cleared on reboot, the payload vanishes after the system restarts. It may execute in memory as a separate process or be injected into another process, but its defining trait is that it does not persist across reboots. Options that imply writing to disk or creating a persistent loader would leave traces or survive reboot, which is not the behavior described.