Windows Privilege Escalation
Privilege Escalation refers to the process of exploiting misconfigurations, known vulnerabilities and unintended bugs in order to gain higher privileges on the target host. The final objective of this process is to gain the highest level of privileges on a target machine, achieving full compromise of that target.
Windows Privilege Escalation:
Pages
- Enumerating Attack Vectors (Windows) Windows privilege escalation is usually a configuration flaw, not a missing patch. The highest-value paths are token-impersonation privileges, weak …
- Excessive User Rights Abuse Windows token privileges are the most direct path to SYSTEM on a compromised host. A web shell on an IIS server or a SQL Server xp_cmdshell almost …
- Built-in Groups Abuse Windows ships with privileged built-in groups whose membership grants powerful rights short of full administrator — and several are a direct path to …
- File System ACLs & Service Permissions Windows services are one of the most common privilege escalation paths because they often run as LocalSystem while pointing to files, service objects, …
- Services Hijacking Windows services are the highest-yield privilege escalation surface on the platform because they run as LocalSystem while referencing four separate …
- User Account Control (UAC) Bypass UAC bypasses leverage flaws or unintended functionality in different Windows builds. The following repository contains many different UAC bypassing …
- Living off the Land LOLBins and LOLBAS are signed, Microsoft-shipped binaries already present on a default Windows install. They exist so nothing unsigned touches disk — …
- Windows Privilege Escalation Checklist Working document — tick as you go. Commands are abbreviated; full detail is in the matching section of the notes. Stop at the first successful path. …