BackTrack 4: Assuring Security by Penetration Testing

Chapter 10. Privilege Escalation

In the previous chapter, we exploited a target using the vulnerabilities found during the vulnerabilities mapping process. The target of this exploitation is to get the privilege accounts, such as administrator level in the Windows system or root level accounts in the Unix system.

Unfortunately, not all of the exploitation will lead to the privilege accounts; sometimes you can only have unprivileged accounts after the exploitation is finished. This is where the privilege escalation process takes place. In this process you try to escalate the limited privilege you have by:

• Attacking the password used by the privilege accounts
• Sniffing the network to get the privilege accounts username and password
• Spoofing the network ...