Understanding Contributor IaaS escalation goals

As a Contributor, we want to eventually escalate our privileges up to the Owner role on the subscription, and/or a privileged role in the Azure AD tenant. With this role, we now have significantly more options than a Reader for attempting to escalate our privileges in the environment. As part of this, we will want to use our permissions on IaaS resources to potentially gather higher-privileged credentials from those resources. Since we have control over almost every aspect of the IaaS resources, we can now start diving deeper into those resources.

Important note

While the scenarios outlined in this chapter assume that you have Contributor access on an IaaS resource, that may not always be the case during an Azure pentest. You may be in a situation where you have local or domain credentials that allow you to execute commands on a VM, but no actual access to a subscription. The techniques that we will outline in this chapter can easily...