Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing – Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

By : Vijay Kumar Velu
Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing – Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

By: Vijay Kumar Velu

Overview of this book

Remote working has given hackers plenty of opportunities as more confidential information is shared over the internet than ever before. In this new edition of Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing, you’ll learn an offensive approach to enhance your penetration testing skills by testing the sophisticated tactics employed by real hackers. You’ll go through laboratory integration to cloud services so that you learn another dimension of exploitation that is typically forgotten during a penetration test. You'll explore different ways of installing and running Kali Linux in a VM and containerized environment and deploying vulnerable cloud services on AWS using containers, exploiting misconfigured S3 buckets to gain access to EC2 instances. This book delves into passive and active reconnaissance, from obtaining user information to large-scale port scanning. Building on this, different vulnerability assessments are explored, including threat modeling. See how hackers use lateral movement, privilege escalation, and command and control (C2) on compromised systems. By the end of this book, you’ll have explored many advanced pentesting approaches and hacking techniques employed on networks, IoT, embedded peripheral devices, and radio frequencies.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
15
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16
Index

Escalating from administrator to system

Administrator privileges allow an attacker to create and manage accounts and access most data available on a system. However, some complex functionality mandates that the requester have system-level access privileges. There are several ways to continue this escalation to the system level. The easiest way is to run PsExec to get system-level access by uploading PsExec to the desired folder and run the following command as a local administrator:

PsExec -s -i -d cmd.exe

This command should open up another Command Prompt as the system user, as shown in Figure 12.7:

Figure 12.7: Escalating from local administrator to SYSTEM using Psexec

DLL injection

DLL (Dynamic Link Library) injection is another easy technique that is utilized by attackers to run remote code in the context of the address space of another process. This process must be running with excess privileges that can then be used to escalate privilege in the form...