Book Image

Cybersecurity - Attack and Defense Strategies

By : Yuri Diogenes, Dr. Erdal Ozkaya
Book Image

Cybersecurity - Attack and Defense Strategies

By: Yuri Diogenes, Dr. Erdal Ozkaya

Overview of this book

The book will start talking about the security posture before moving to Red Team tactics, where you will learn the basic syntax for the Windows and Linux tools that are commonly used to perform the necessary operations. You will also gain hands-on experience of using new Red Team techniques with powerful tools such as python and PowerShell, which will enable you to discover vulnerabilities in your system and how to exploit them. Moving on, you will learn how a system is usually compromised by adversaries, and how they hack user's identity, and the various tools used by the Red Team to find vulnerabilities in a system. In the next section, you will learn about the defense strategies followed by the Blue Team to enhance the overall security of a system. You will also learn about an in-depth strategy to ensure that there are security controls in each network layer, and how you can carry out the recovery process of a compromised system. Finally, you will learn how to create a vulnerability management strategy and the different techniques for manual log analysis.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 8. Privilege Escalation

The previous chapters have explained the process of performing an attack to a point where the attacker can compromise a system. The previous Chapter 7, Lateral Movement, discussed how an attacker can move around in the compromised system without being identified or raising any alarms. A general trend was observable, where legitimate tools were being used to avoid alerts. A similar trend may also be observed in this phase of the attack life cycle.

In this chapter, close attention will be paid to how attackers heighten the privileges of the user accounts that they have compromised. The aim of an attacker at this stage is to have the required level of privileges to achieve a greater objective. It could be mass deletion, corruption, or theft of data, disabling of computers, destroying hardware, and so many other things. An attacker requires control over access systems so that he can succeed with all of his plans. Mostly, attackers seek to acquire admin-level privileges...