My main question is: how did the attacker gain access to her system behind the NAT? If I obtain someone's public IP address and port, can I exploit their system? What methods might the intruder have used to compromise the machine?
There are many opportunities that attackers can use. I've listed a few common ones below:
- An attacker can hijack an existing insecure session to a compromised web service
- An attacker can use tactics (usually social engineering) for the session to be started from the client side. This is usually social engineering or domain typo squatting etc.
Because these tactics get the client to establish the session, NAT and inbound firewalls doesn't provide any benefit of security or obscurity.