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 Windows configuration files

Windows can automate a variety of repetitive tasks, such as the mass rollout or installation of Windows on many systems. An example of this is the Unattended Windows Setup utility, which automates the mass installation of Windows. This tool utilizes configuration files that contain specific configurations and user account credentials that can be used by attackers to elevate privileges. In this section, we will be taking a look at how to search for and identify the configuration files that are used during the Unattended Windows Setup process.

It is important to note that this technique will vary based on the version of Windows being use, as well as whether Windows was installed using the Unattended Windows Setup utility. Given the typical use case of the Unattended Windows Setup utility, this method will be useful when it's employed in an organization-specific environment. However, you may run into individual systems that...