Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Third Edition

By : Vijay Kumar Velu, Robert Beggs
Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Third Edition

By: Vijay Kumar Velu, Robert Beggs

Overview of this book

This book takes you, as a tester or security practitioner, through the reconnaissance, vulnerability assessment, exploitation, privilege escalation, and post-exploitation activities used by pentesters. To start with, you'll use a laboratory environment to validate tools and techniques, along with an application that supports a collaborative approach for pentesting. You'll then progress to passive reconnaissance with open source intelligence and active reconnaissance of the external and internal infrastructure. You'll also focus on how to select, use, customize, and interpret the results from different vulnerability scanners, followed by examining specific routes to the target, which include bypassing physical security and the exfiltration of data using a variety of techniques. You'll discover concepts such as social engineering, attacking wireless networks, web services, and embedded devices. Once you are confident with these topics, you'll learn the practical aspects of attacking user client systems by backdooring with fileless techniques, followed by focusing on the most vulnerable part of the network – directly attacking the end user. By the end of this book, you'll have explored approaches for carrying out advanced pentesting in tightly secured environments, understood pentesting and hacking techniques employed on embedded peripheral devices.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Escalating from domain user to system administrator


In most cases, attackers performing console-level attacks or social-engineering attacks might gain access to a normal domain user who is not a local administrator, which leaves them with access only to a limited level of privileges. This can be bypassed and exploited to gain system-level access on the victim machine without having to be a local admin.

 

When attackers initially gain access to the system and try to run system-level commands, they receive the response access denied or no privilege available to run the commands on the target system. This can be verified by running the getsystem command from the Meterpreter console, as shown in the following screenshot:

In this section, we will explore one vulnerability that exists in Windows 2008 and Windows 7. We will use the latest local exploit, ms18_8120_win32k_privesc, exploiting the Win32k component, which doesn't handle the object's property in memory. You can move the existing Meterpreter...