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 7: Windows Password Mining

An important privilege escalation attack vector that usually goes unexplored is the process of searching for locally stored credentials on the target system. This process involves searching for specific passwords and password hashes that can then be used to elevate privileges directly, without the use of any exploits.

This chapter will focus on the process of searching for passwords and dumping password hashes on the target system by using various utilities and techniques.

We will also take a look at how Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM) hashes can be cracked and utilized to elevate privileges on a target system.

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

  • What is password mining?
  • Searching for passwords in files
  • Searching for passwords in Windows configuration files
  • Searching for application passwords
  • Dumping Windows hashes
  • Cracking Windows hashes