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Privilege escalation is the act of exploiting a bug, a design flaw, or a configuration oversight in an operating system or software application to gain elevated access to resources that are normally protected from an application or user.
Not holding privileges until actually required is in keeping with the principle of least privilege. Elevated processes will run with the full privileges of the user, not the full privileges of the system. Even so, the privileges of the user may still be more than what is required for that particular process, thus not completely least privilege.
Windows 1.0–3.11 and Windows 9x: all applications had privileges equivalent to the operating system;; All versions of Windows NT up to, and including, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003: introduced multiple user-accounts, but in practice most users continued to function as an administrator for their normal operations.
This poses a security risk that led to the development of UAC. Users can set a process to run with elevated privileges from standard accounts by setting the process to "run as administrator" or using the runas command and authenticating the prompt with credentials (username and password) of an administrator account. Much of the benefit of ...
Distinguishing between privileged and non-privileged access for users with elevated permissions. Constraining the count of users possessing privileged rights. Restricting privileged rights solely to in-house staff. Mandating Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for accessing privileged accounts. [11]
Any user account can be blocked, regardless of which user group(s) it belongs to. While the account is blocked, the blocking flag disables the user or IP's existing editing privileges depending on which block options are set by the administrator. A partial block still allows some parts of Wikipedia to be edited.
With UAC, when logged in as a standard user, the user must enter an administrator's name and password each time they need to grant an application elevated privileges; but when logged in as a member of the Administrators group, they (by default) simply confirm or deny, instead of re-entering their password each time (though that is an option).
It can use that privilege to open a running LocalSystem (akin to UNIX "root") process, such as winlogon.exe, and inject its own code, escalating its privilege to LocalSystem. Similarly, the SeTakeOwnership privilege, which allows taking ownership of files without explicit permission, can be used on the Registry to change the Administrator password.