Chapter 13. Privilege Escalation
"To accomplish great things, one must escalate his privilege to the highest level not only by act, but also by dream."
Privilege escalation is the process of going from a relatively low level of access rights to gaining the privileges of an administrator, the system, or even greater access privileges. It allows the penetration tester to own all aspects of a system's operations. More importantly, obtaining some access privileges will allow the tester to control all systems across a network. As vulnerability becomes more difficult to find and exploit, there has been a significant amount of research conducted in privilege escalation as a means of ensuring a successful penetration test.
In this chapter, we will look at the following topics:
- Common escalation methodology
- Local system escalation
- DLL injection
- PowerShell's Empire tool
- Credential harvesting and escalation
- Active Directory access rights
- Golden ticket attack on Kerberos
