Khalil Bijjou is a passionate penetration tester and security consultant with a big curiosity for technical topics, especially in the field of IT security. Placed 2nd in the German Post IT Security Cup 2015 and carries the Mint award 2016 in the field of Cybersecurity. An organized, conscientious self-starter, able to prioritize effectively and accomplish complex tasks. Stays calm under pressure, learns quickly and able to convey enthusiasm to others. Author of the “Web Application Firewall Bypassing – an approach for penetration testers” paper which was presented at three international conferences. Publisher of the open-source tool WAFNinja which is used by security experts world-wide.

Well, that escalated quickly! – a penetration tester’s approach to privilege escalation

Companies engage security experts to penetrate their infrastructures and systems in order to find vulnerabilities before malicious persons do. During these penetration tests, security experts often encounter Windows endpoints or systems and gain low privileged access to these. To fully compromise the system, privileges have to be escalated.Windows contains a great number of security concepts and mechanisms. These render privilege escalation attacks difficult. Penetration testers should have a sound knowledge base about Windows components and security mechanisms in order to understand privilege escalation concepts profoundly and apply these.
This talk imparts knowledge on Windows required to understand privilege escalation attacks. It describes the most relevant privilege escalation methods and techniques and names suitable tools and commands. These methods and techniques have been categorized, included into an attack tree and were tested and verified in a realistic lab environment. Based upon these results, a systematic and practical approach for security experts on how to escalate privileges was developed.