MITRE ATT&CK / T1088
T1088
Bypass User Account Control
Description
Windows User Account Control (UAC) allows a program to elevate its privileges to perform a task under administrator-level permissions by prompting the user for confirmation. The impact to the user ranges from denying the operation under high enforcement to allowing the user to perform the action if they are in the local administrators group and click through the prompt or allowing them to enter an administrator password to complete the action. (Citation: TechNet How UAC Works)If the UAC protection level of a computer is set to anything but the highest level, certain Windows programs are allowed to elevate privileges or execute some elevated COM objects without prompting the user through the UAC notification box. (Citation: TechNet Inside UAC) (Citation: MSDN COM Elevation) An example of this is use of rundll32.exe to load a specifically crafted DLL which loads an auto-elevated COM object and performs a file operation in a protected directory which would typically require elevated access. Malicious software may also be injected into a trusted process to gain elevated privileges without prompting a user. (Citation: Davidson Windows) Adversaries can use these techniques to elevate privileges to administrator if the target process is unprotected.Many methods have been discovered to bypass UAC. The Github readme page for UACMe contains an extensive list of methods (Citation: Github UACMe) that have been discovered and implemented within UACMe, but may not be a comprehensive li…
Platforms
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Source: MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise matrix. View on attack.mitre.org →