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

Understanding the Windows Registry

Before we can dig into the meat and potatoes of this chapter, we must have a functional understanding of the Windows Registry, what it is used for, and how it works.

This information will prove useful in the latter sections of this chapter and will provide a much better context of what we are doing, as well as what we want to achieve, when we utilize various privilege escalation techniques.

What is the Windows Registry?

Simply put, the Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that is responsible for storing configurations, settings, and values for applications, hardware, and the Windows operating system. In the context of programs and applications, the registry is also used to store program and application data relevant to the configuration and operation of the program.

Given the centralized nature of the Windows Registry and the data it stores, it is a prime target for penetration testers during the privilege escalation process. This...