Ethical Hacking: Techniques, Tools, and Countermeasures, 4th Edition

Planting Backdoors

The next step after escalating privileges is to place a backdoor on the system so the attacker can come back later and take control of the system repeatedly. An attacker who places a backdoor on a system can use it for various purposes depending on their specific goals. Reasons for planting backdoors include the following:

• Placing a rootkit

• Executing a Trojan

• Providing easy future access for follow-on attacks

Of course, the question is how to install a backdoor on a system. With the escalated privileges obtained earlier, the attacker has the power to run an application on a system more freely than they would without such privileges. If the privileges obtained previously were those of an administrator (or equivalent), ...