In this section, we will look at using Metasploit to obtain the highest level of privileges on the target system. Most of the applications we are targeting run on user-level privileges, which provide us with general access but not access to the complete system. However, to obtain system-level access, we need to escalate privileges using vulnerabilities in the target system after gaining access to the system. Let us see how we can achieve system-level access to various types of operating system in the next sections.
During a penetration test, we often run into situations where we have limited access, and, when running commands such as hashdump, we might get the following error:
In such cases, if we try achieving system privileges with the getsystem command, we get the following errors:
So, what shall we do in these cases? The answer is to escalate privileges using post-exploitation to achieve the highest level of...