Obtaining a user's credentials to access a system is only part of the gaining-access phase in penetration testing. However, remember that not all user accounts have root or administrator privileges. Therefore, remotely accessing a system with a non-root or standard user account will prevent you from executing certain applications and performing administrative tasks on the victim's system.
Escalating privileges can be executed using a variety of techniques, including the following:
- Obtaining information from the SAM file on Windows
- Retrieving data from the passwd file on Linux
- Exploiting weak permissions on running processes on a system
- Obtaining sensitive information found on stored network file shares
- Capturing the hash value of a user's password while they are communicating with another device on the network.
The information found in the...
