Book Image

Cybersecurity – Attack and Defense Strategies - Second Edition

By : Yuri Diogenes, Dr. Erdal Ozkaya
Book Image

Cybersecurity – Attack and Defense Strategies - Second Edition

By: Yuri Diogenes, Dr. Erdal Ozkaya

Overview of this book

Cybersecurity – Attack and Defense Strategies, Second Edition is a completely revised new edition of the bestselling book, covering the very latest security threats and defense mechanisms including a detailed overview of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and an assessment of the current threat landscape, with additional focus on new IoT threats and cryptomining. Cybersecurity starts with the basics that organizations need to know to maintain a secure posture against outside threat and design a robust cybersecurity program. It takes you into the mindset of a Threat Actor to help you better understand the motivation and the steps of performing an actual attack – the Cybersecurity kill chain. You will gain hands-on experience in implementing cybersecurity using new techniques in reconnaissance and chasing a user’s identity that will enable you to discover how a system is compromised, and identify and then exploit the vulnerabilities in your own system. This book also focuses on defense strategies to enhance the security of a system. You will also discover in-depth tools, including Azure Sentinel, to ensure there are security controls in each network layer, and how to carry out the recovery process of a compromised system.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
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19
Index

Privilege escalation techniques

In this section, we will look at various techniques that hackers can use to perform privilege escalation on various platforms. Let's begin with the dumping the SAM file technique.

Dumping the SAM file

This is a technique used on compromised Windows systems by hackers to gain admin privileges. The main weakness exploited is the local storage of passwords as LAN Manager (LM) hashes on the hard disk. These passwords might be for normal user accounts as well as local admin and domain admin credentials.

There are many ways that hackers can use to gain these hashes. A commonly used command-line tool is HoboCopy, which can easily fetch Security Accounts Manager (SAM) files on a hard disk. The SAM files are sensitive since they contain the user passwords hashed and partially encrypted. Once HoboCopy has located these files and dumped them to a more easily accessible location, hackers can quickly fetch the hashes of all accounts on the computer...