We know there is more than likely going to be host protection that we may have to encounter; therefore, in our pen testing labs, we want to test the different host protection to see what we can and cannot do. This is an area that again is going to depend on the administrator and the team that we are up against. A hardened machine with very little services running on it will present a challenge to our testing.
One of the most common things we are going to encounter is User Account Control (UAC); this is because it is on by default and is rarely changed when a site installs Windows. One good thing about UAC is the fact that the users are conditioned to click. So, if something pops up saying it needs permission, the user more than likely will click on it. We can use this to our advantage, but there always is a chance that the user might not click. So, for these situations, we rely on some form of UAC bypass to get us past the UAC protections.
Within...