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 12: Scheduled Tasks

One of the most important privilege escalation vectors on Linux is exploiting misconfigured scheduled tasks, also known as cron jobs. This chapter will focus on the process of enumerating the scheduled tasks running on the target system, analyzing them for misconfigurations, and exploiting them to elevate our privileges.

We will start this chapter by looking at how Linux implements scheduled tasks with cron, after which we will take a look at how to escalate our privileges through cron paths. We will then take a look at how to exploit cron wildcards to elevate our privileges, before exploring the process of escalating our privileges via cron file overwrites.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

  • Introduction to cron jobs
  • Escalation via cron paths
  • Escalation via cron wildcards
  • Escalation via cron file overwrites