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

What is password mining?

Password mining is the process of searching for and enumerating encrypted or cleartext passwords stored in persistent or volatile memory on the target system. The primary objective of this process involves identifying potentially useful user accounts and application passwords, which can then expand our authority over a target system and potentially provide us with elevated privileges.

Given the nature of Windows configurations and deployment use cases, this process will differ from target to target. Therefore, it is important to have a good understanding of how and where passwords, both encrypted and cleartext, are stored on Windows.

It is also important to understand that this process relies on a series of vulnerabilities that are a result of an organization's or individual's password security practices. Poor password security practices are the primary target for attackers as they provide a straightforward access vector, without the need for...