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 registry permissions

This privilege escalation technique involves identifying and modifying the registry values of a service with a standard user account. In many cases, writing or modifying values in the Windows Registry is limited to administrators. However, you may come across services that can be modified by standard user accounts.

We can leverage this vulnerability to modify the ImagePath (the application path) of a service with the path of a custom executable. This will give us an elevated session when the service is restarted.

This technique will only work on systems that have at least one or more services with weak permissions.

The exploitation process can be performed by following these steps:

  1. The first step in this process involves identifying a list of services whose registry values can be modified. In this case, we can use the winPEAS enumeration tool to enumerate a list of services with registry values and their respective permissions...