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

Understanding kernel exploits

Before we can get started with utilizing various kernel exploits on Windows, it is vitally important to understand what a kernel is and how it is set up and configured.

This will give you a clearer picture of how and why kernels are exploited and how they can be exploited to elevate privileges on Windows.

Let's begin by understanding what a kernel is and what functions it serves in the context of an operating system.

What is a kernel?

A kernel is a computer program that is the core of an operating system and has complete control over every resource and hardware on a system. It acts as a translation layer between hardware and software and facilitates the communication between these two layers.

The kernel runs in system memory and is loaded immediately after the bootloader during the system startup process and is responsible for handling the remaining startup procedures for the operating system.

The kernel is responsible for performing...