Understanding the Windows DLL injection flaws

In this recipe, we will deal with a special kind of vulnerability that does not directly exist in the Windows operating system. In fact, it exists in various application software that run on Windows. This remote attack vector deals with a class of vulnerabilities that affects how applications load external libraries. We will give an oversight of this issue to analyze it closely.

Getting ready

This attack vector involves creation of a vulnerable path or directory that the target will have to execute in order to trigger it. The directory can be a file, extracted archive, USB drive, network share, and so on. The file created will be completely harmless, but it will execute a DLL injection code to compromise the system.

How to do it...

Let us analyze a practical implementation of a DLL injection. In this example, our target machine is an unpatched Windows 7 Ultimate machine. The process works by creating a link to share the file which the target will...