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 3: Gaining Access (Exploitation)

Before we can get our hands dirty with privilege escalation on both Windows and Linux, we need to explore the process of exploitation and the various exploitation techniques that can be leveraged, including how these techniques will affect the privilege escalation process.

Exploitation is a unique phase of the penetration testing life cycle. This is because it involves actively engaging with the target to determine or discover flaws or vulnerabilities that can be exploited in order to gain access.

Exploitation sets the scene for a successful penetration test and validates how far you will be able to get on a target system or network. Choosing the correct attack vector and exploitation framework or exploit is critical for gaining and maintaining access to a target system.

In this chapter, you will learn about the various ways of exploiting both Windows and Linux systems and how to leverage exploitation frameworks such as Metasploit...