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

Searching for passwords in files

The first step of this process involves searching for passwords in various files stored locally. This will allow us to identify any user or application passwords in text or configuration files. This can be achieved by using built-in Windows utilities that allow us to search for specific strings in files with specific extensions.

We will begin this process by following the different procedures outlined here:

  • The first step involves searching the local filesystem for a specific string. In this case, the string we will be searching for is password. This will enumerate all occurrences of the string, their values, and their respective filenames and locations. This can be done by running the findstr utility in the Windows command shell:
    findstr /si password *.txt

    This command will perform a case-sensitive search for the password string in all subdirectories.

    Note

    findstr is a Windows utility that is used to search for strings in files and can be used...