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 administrator to system


Administrator privileges allow an attacker to create and manage accounts and access most data available on a system. However, some complex functionality mandates that the requester have system-level access privileges. There are several ways to continue this escalation to the system level. The most common is to use the at command, which is now deprecated due to security reasons and used by Windows to schedule tasks for a particular time. The at command always runs with privileges at the system level; however, these now run in non-interactive mode only:

Using an interactive shell (enter shell at the Meterpreter prompt), open a Command Prompt and determine the compromised system's local time. If the time is 12:50 (the at function uses the 24-hour notation), schedule an interactive command shell for a later time, as shown in the following screenshot:

After the at task is scheduled to run, reconfirm your access privileges at the Meterpreter prompt, as shown...