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

Chapter 9: Privilege Escalation through the Windows Registry

You should now have a good grasp of how to identify and perform some of the most important privilege escalation techniques on Windows. However, one final piece of this puzzle remains: the Windows Registry. In this chapter, we will look at how to elevate privileges on the target system by leveraging misconfigurations and weaknesses in the Windows Registry.

We will explore the process of identifying misconfigurations in the registry, utilizing the Autorun functionality, exploiting weak registry permissions, and the AlwaysInstallElevated feature to elevate our privileges. We will also provide a brief overview of the Windows Registry to understand its purpose and functionality.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

  • Understanding the Windows Registry
  • Exploiting Autorun programs
  • Exploiting the AlwaysInstallElevated feature
  • Exploiting weak registry permissions