Network Vulnerability Assessment

Privilege escalation on Windows

As we saw in the previous section, on a Windows system, the user with the highest privileges is known as the administrator. Once we compromise a system using any of the available exploits, our aim should be to elevate the user privileges to that of the administrator.

The following screenshot shows an exploitation of the ms08_067_netapi vulnerability with Windows XP as the target. Metasploit successfully exploited the vulnerability and gave a meterpreter session, as shown in the following screenshot:

The meterpreter provides us with the ability to escalate privileges. The getsystem command is specifically used ...