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

Performing privilege escalation


Privilege escalation can be done in a number of ways, depending on the level of skill that the hacker has and the intended outcome of the privilege escalation process. In Windows, administrator access should be rare and normal users should not have administrative access to systems. However, sometimes it becomes necessary to give remote users admin access to enable them to troubleshoot and solve some issues. This is something that system administrators should be worried about. When giving remote users admin access, admins should be cautious enough to ensure that this type of access is not used for privilege escalation. There are risks when normal employees in an organization maintain admin access. They open a network to multiple attack vectors.

To begin with, malicious users can also use this access level to extract password hashes that can, later on, be used to recover the actual passwords or be used directly in remote attacks through pass-the-hash. This has...