Book Image

Privilege Escalation Techniques

By : Alexis Ahmed
5 (2)
Book Image

Privilege Escalation Techniques

5 (2)
By: Alexis Ahmed

Overview of this book

Privilege Escalation Techniques is a detailed guide to privilege escalation techniques and tools for both Windows and Linux systems. This is a one-of-a-kind resource that will deepen your understanding of both platforms and provide detailed, easy-to-follow instructions for your first foray into privilege escalation. The book uses virtual environments that you can download to test and run tools and techniques. After a refresher on gaining access and surveying systems, each chapter will feature an exploitation challenge in the form of pre-built virtual machines (VMs). As you progress, you will learn how to enumerate and exploit a target Linux or Windows system. You’ll then get a demonstration on how you can escalate your privileges to the highest level. By the end of this book, you will have gained all the knowledge and skills you need to be able to perform local kernel exploits, escalate privileges through vulnerabilities in services, maintain persistence, and enumerate information from the target such as passwords and password hashes.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Gaining Access and Local Enumeration
6
Section 2: Windows Privilege Escalation
12
Section 3: Linux Privilege Escalation

Exploiting unquoted service paths

When starting or running services, Windows requires the location of the target executable in order to run. The path of the executable is typically encapsulated by quotation marks, which allows Windows to locate the path or location of the executable. The following path is an example of a secure service path:

"C:\Program Files\OpenSSH\bin\cygrunsrv.exe"

If the path of the executable is not encapsulated by quotation marks, Windows will resort to searching for the executable in every directory and executing each one until it locates the target executable. We can leverage this vulnerability to elevate our privileges by identifying a service that runs under administrative privileges and that is not encapsulated in quotation marks. The following path is an example of an insecure service path that we can exploit:

C:\Program Files\OpenSSH\bin\cygrunsrv.exe

The exploitation process involves generating and uploading a binary to the target...