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

Information gathering and footprinting

Before we can exploit a target system, we need to accurately enumerate in order to retrieve important information from our targets. This phase of the penetration testing life cycle involves scanning and discovering hosts on a network. We scan these hosts to find the open ports and services that are running along with their versions. Additionally, we identify what operating systems the targets are running.

This is one of the most important phases of a penetration test, as it will determine the overall success of the exploitation phase. If we can gather and enumerate enough information from our targets, we can set up effective attacks and exploits. However, if we don't do this, our exploitation methods will be inefficient and may not yield any results.

We will begin the footprinting process by mapping out our virtual network to discover the target virtual machines and their corresponding IP addresses.

Network mapping with Nmap

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