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

Extracting passwords from memory

We can begin the password mining process by exploring an uncommon technique that can be used to extract application passwords from memory. The viability and success of this technique will depend on the type of applications that are running on the target and its deployment use case.

Applications and services that utilize username and password authentication may store credentials in user-space memory, either in cleartext or in an encrypted state. Dumping and analyzing the memory of a particular service may reveal credentials pertinent to the application. We can use these credentials to gain access and take control of the particular service; alternatively, we can use the discovered credentials for authentication to other user accounts in order to elevate our privileges. This is because many users and system administrators are prone to reusing passwords for various applications and their user accounts.

We can use the GNU Debugger (GDB) to dump the...