Windows Privilege Escalation: The Concepts of Hijacking Execution Flow

Jill is a Manager at OCD Tech, a Boston-based cybersecurity consulting firm. She oversees the firm’s IT Advisory Services and has a strong focus in penetration testing, having earned her GPEN certification in 2020. She’s conducted numerous assessments, the most common of which have been penetration tests of Active Directory, external infrastructure, cloud environments, and web…

This article will cover four similar, but different, techniques for escalating privileges on Windows systems. Each technique, at its core, has to do with permissions loopholes and basic program execution, and is more about operating system logic than any…