Performing Privilege Escalation

Privilege escalation can be done in a number of ways, depending on the level of skill that the hacker has and the intended outcome of the privilege escalation process. In Windows, administrator access should be rare and normal users should not have administrative access to systems.

However, sometimes it becomes necessary to give remote users admin access to enable them to troubleshoot and solve some issues. This is something that system administrators should be worried about. When giving remote users admin access, admins should be cautious enough to ensure that this type of access is not used for privilege escalation. There are risks when normal employees in an organization maintain admin access. They open up their network to multiple attack vectors.

To begin with, malicious users can use this access level to extract password hashes that can, later on, be used to recover the actual passwords or be used directly in remote attacks through pass-the...