I apologize for my presumption,  but thought it was a cool title 😉 Some days ago, I was reflecting on the SeRestorePrivilege and wondering if a user with this privilege could alter a Service Access, for example: grant to everyone the right to stop/start the service,  during a "restore" task.  (don't expect some cool bypass or exploit…

Creating symbolics links on Windows systems  is a feature which has been added starting from Windows Vista. Unlike Unix, where every user can create symbolic links,  in Windows,  to perform this operation you need a special privilege: SeCreateSymbolicLinkPrivilege. This privilege, if granted, is only available in a high integrity level process.  The reason of this security…

As promised, this is the official response from Microsoft when I asked them how to protect against the DCOM/NTLM reflection abuse: "The team has responded that with the current model there are no hardening recommendations we can offer. They are taking this report as something to pursue for next-version hardening but I don't have an…

Today me and my partner in crime Giuseppe, are releasing our small research with Windows impersonate privileges. The result is a tool named "Juicy Potato", which is a kind of sequel of the potato researches we have been inspired for months (RottenPotatoNG  and its variants). All the information and results have been published here My personal…

We all know how important and fundamental it is to keep our Windows systems updated but this is certainly not enough because, as is well known, the weakest link in the chain is always and only the human factor. Very often, the most targeted attacks tend to exploit system misconfigurations rather than looking in vain…

"Backup Operators" group is an historical Windows built in group. It was designed to allow its members to perform backup and restore operations by granting the SeBackupPrivilege and the SeRestorePrivilege. What does this mean? Well, for some operations like backup and restore, the DACL (Discretionary Access Control Lists) are ignored; this to permit then backup/restore…

In your red teaming or pentesting activities escalating to  SYSTEM on a Windows box is always the desired objective. The SYSTEM user is a special operating system user with the highest privilege, many post exploitation techniques require this type of access. Of course, in order to get SYSTEM you have be part of the administrators group…

I just finished playing  with the Rotten Potato C# exploit  in order to get it work standalone that the author  @breenmachine  released the C++ standalone version of  "Rotten Potato". He really did a great job! https://github.com/foxglovesec/RottenPotatoNG  Time for me to play with this new version, dig deeper in some "obscure" Windows API   calls and access tokens …

As promised in the previous post, I will show you how to embed the "lonely potato" in InstallUtil.exe. Why do we need that? Because, as explained here , with Installutil we can call our C# assembly with whatever extension we like, for example ".txt". Cool way to bypass some Application and File restriction policies.... Quick and…