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 6: Impersonation Attacks

Now that you have got your hands dirty with the privilege escalation process on Windows, we can begin exploring other attack vectors that can be exploited to elevate our privileges. In this chapter, we will be taking a closer look at Windows access tokens, how they work, and how they can be leveraged to elevate our privileges through impersonation attacks.

The practical demonstrations in this chapter will primarily be focused on how to enumerate privileges on a system to determine whether it is vulnerable to impersonation attacks and how to generate or impersonate a privileged Windows access token that can be used to elevate our privileges.

We will also look at how to use various built-in meterpreter modules to automate the token impersonation process on a target system.

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

  • Understanding Windows access tokens
  • Enumerating privileges
  • Token impersonation attacks...