Privilege escalation techniques
In this section, we will look at various techniques that hackers can use to perform privilege escalation on various platforms. Let's begin with the dumping the SAM file technique.
Dumping the SAM file
This is a technique used on compromised Windows systems by hackers to gain admin privileges. The main weakness exploited is the local storage of passwords as LAN Manager (LM) hashes on the hard disk. These passwords might be for normal user accounts as well as local admin and domain admin credentials.
There are many ways that hackers can use to gain these hashes. A commonly used command-line tool is HoboCopy, which can easily fetch Security Accounts Manager (SAM) files on a hard disk. The SAM files are sensitive since they contain the user passwords hashed and partially encrypted. Once HoboCopy has located these files and dumped them to a more easily accessible location, hackers can quickly fetch the hashes of all accounts on the computer...
