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

Searching for passwords in history files

One of the advantages of running Linux is the extensive amount of logging that is afforded to a user. By default, Linux will automatically log all Bash commands entered on a system by a user unless specified otherwise. This is an advantage for system administrators as it provides a system of accountability whereby all user actions and commands are logged and can be analyzed historically; however, if not configured correctly, attackers can leverage this functionality to search for and identify important information such as credentials from various history files that log the commands entered by a user.

Companies and organizations mitigate this inherent configuration vulnerability by disabling the user command history from being logged. Alternatively, they can also enforce the deletion of these logs once a user has completed a session. However, in many cases, users on a Linux system may forget to clear their history, and as a result, attackers...