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

Introduction to filesystem permissions on Linux

Before we begin exploring the process of exploiting SUID binaries to elevate our privileges, we need to take a brief look at filesystem permissions on Linux and how they can be used to provide or limit access to files and directories. This will help us set up the stage for our foray into SUID binaries, how they are configured, and how they can be exploited.

Filesystem permissions on Linux are used to grant or limit access to files and directories. This is a very useful feature as it allows users to restrict access to particular files or directories, thus preventing any unauthorized access.

We can list the permissions of a file or folder on Linux by running the following command:

ls -al

As highlighted in the following screenshot, this command will output a list of all the files in a directory and all their attributes, including their access permissions and ownership details:

Figure 13.1 – File...