Bypassing UAC on Windows 2023

Paulo Bazzo

Introduction

Ok these are a really simple UAC bypass from a userland GUI perspective. This is about increasing process integrity levels it’s not about performing LPE from low integrity to high/SYSTEM with no interaction. These clearly work in older version of Windows as well but since Windows 11 will be the current version in the near future I thought it was fun to re-visit these!
And just to be clear, a medium integrity process as an administrator user will have the following privileges:

We are going to open another process running on high integrity without knowing the credentials.

Bypassing UAC like a Boss

azman.msc

Run azman.msc

Click Help

Right click on the right-hand pane and click VIEW SOURCE

From notepad click FILE OPEN

Right click + shift and click open powershell window here

And now you have a process with high integrity

Msconfig UAC Bypass

The use case for this bypass is when you have access to the session but DO NOT have the credentials.

Open msconfig.exe

Click on the 'Tools' tab

Congratulations, you are now running cmd with the highest privileges.

iscsicpl.exe

Another method comes from running c:\windows\system32\iscsicpl.exe

Click No

Click CONFIGURATION

Click REPORT

Right Click + SHIFT and Open Powershell

Task Scheduler

MMC/Device Manager/Group Policy Editor etc

Run

mmc devmgmt.msc

Click Help

Help Topics

Rick click and view source

Use the file open and then RIGHT CLICK + SHIFT to launch a shell

MORE

Ok so we get the gist of how to exploit this manually so what we need is a list of more binaries we can use:

  • netplwiz.exe
  • dcomcnfg.exe
  • perfmon.exe
  • compMgmtLauncher.exe
  • eventvwr.exe

So theres lots of ways of doing this via binaries.

Summary

These might seem like they are not useful, but you can find position where these can be exploited. It’s often the small things that make a difference.

Ref

PWNDEFEND CobaltStrike