Chapter 11: Linux Password Mining

Now that you have an understanding of how to utilize kernel exploits on Linux in order to elevate your privileges, we can begin exploring the process of searching for and identifying locally stored credentials on Linux systems. This process will involve searching for specific passwords and application credentials that can be used to elevate our privileges directly, without the use of any exploits.

This chapter will focus on the various tools and techniques that can be used to find and identify passwords that can consequently provide us with an elevated session.

We will start off by taking a look at how to extract passwords and credentials stored in memory, after which we will take a look at how to identify credentials in application and operating system configuration files. We will then conclude the chapter by exploring the process of searching and identifying passwords logged in history files.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the...