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 11: Linux Password Mining

Now that you have an understanding of how to utilize kernel exploits on Linux in order to elevate your privileges, we can begin exploring the process of searching for and identifying locally stored credentials on Linux systems. This process will involve searching for specific passwords and application credentials that can be used to elevate our privileges directly, without the use of any exploits.

This chapter will focus on the various tools and techniques that can be used to find and identify passwords that can consequently provide us with an elevated session.

We will start off by taking a look at how to extract passwords and credentials stored in memory, after which we will take a look at how to identify credentials in application and operating system configuration files. We will then conclude the chapter by exploring the process of searching and identifying passwords logged in history files.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the...