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 weak service permissions

This exploit involves leveraging improperly configured service permissions in order to elevate our privileges. The objective of this process is to identify services that run with SYSTEM or administrative privileges and use the improper permission configurations for the service to execute arbitrary commands through the BINARY_PATH_NAME parameter.

We can exploit this vulnerability to add a standard user to the local administrators group and consequently achieve an elevated state on the system.

The exploitation process can be performed by following these steps:

  1. The first step in the process involves identifying services and applications that standard users have access to. This can be facilitated through the use of the accesschk utility that is found in the Sysinternals suite. The accesschk executable can be downloaded from here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/accesschk.
  2. After downloading the accesschk executable...