Category: Privilege Escalation

Recently, readers saw the Windows Fodhelper Privilege escalation exploit. Today we will learn about another Windows privilege escalation exploit that works on machines from Windows 7 to Windows 10. This exploit bypasses the User Account Control of the Windows and gives us system privileges. Its called Windows BypassUAC COMhijack exploit. How does it do this? Let us see.

COM stands for Component Object Model. It acts as a binary interface between various processes of different programming languages. In Windows, is is the basis for several other Microsoft technologies like OLE, OLE Automation, Browser Helper Object, ActiveX, COM+, DCOM, Windows shell, DirectX and Windows Runtime.

This module will bypass Windows UAC by creating COM handler registry entries in the Hive Key Current User hive. These created registry entries are referenced when certain high integrity processes are loaded which eventually results in the process of loading user controlled DLLs (as you already know DLLs are Dynamic Link Libraries).

These DLLs the exploit loads contain the payloads that result in elevated sessions. After the payload is invocated, registry key modifications this module makes are cleaned up. This module invokes the target binary via cmd.exe on the target. Therefore if cmd.exe access is restricted, this module will not run correctly.

Now let us see how this exploit works. As for every privilege escalation exploit, we need to already have a meterpreter session like the one we have here. Background the current meterpreter session and remember the session id. Search for the bypassuac_comhijack module as shown below.

Load the bypassuac_comhijack module as shown below and check its options by using the “show options” command as shown below.

Set the session id as shown below and execute the exploit using “run” command as shown below. If everything went right, we will have another meterpreter session as shown below.

Check the privileges using the “getuid” command. If you still don’t have system privileges, run command “getsystem” and even if it results in an error, check your privileges once again using command “getuid“. You should definitely have system privileges by now.

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Bypass uac stands for bypassing user account control. User account control is the security measure introduced in Windows OS since Windows 7. It helps in preventing any malicious program from running with admin privileges. With UAC, applications and tasks always run with privileges of a standard or non-administrator account, unless a user authorizes administrator-level access to the system. UAC will not allow any unauthorized program from making any inadvertent changes to the system.

This may include even our meterpreter shell. We have seen many exploits where we got meterpreter shell. But when you check your privileges by typing command “getuid”, we can see that we are running as a standard user as shown below. When we try to get system privileges with command “getsystem”, we can see it failed.

Bypass uac exploit as its name implies, bypasses the user account control security feature in Windows 7 to give us system privileges. This is available in Metasploit. For this exploit to work, we should already have a meterpreter shell on our target system.

Now let use see how to get system privileges with this exploit. First background the current meterpreter session by typing command “background”. Next search for bypassuac exploit as shown below.

Load the exploit as shown below. Type command “show options” to see what options we need to set. We can see only one option is required: session. This is the session id number with which our previous meterpreter session was running. While we background our session, we saw that our session id number is 1. ( see the above image ). Set session id option to 1 as shown below.

Type command “exploit” to run our exploit. Type command “getsystem” to try to get the system privileges once again. This time we successfully got the system privileges as shown below.