On a recent assessment we ran into a situation where we needed to escalate privileges on a fairly locked down workstation. Kernel exploits (kitrap0d) wouldn’t work, so we fell back to an old classic, vulnerable windows services. While we couldn’t manipulate services directly, a custom system service purposely left its binary privileges open for compatibility purposes. tldr; replacing the service binary path with a custom binary (that created a user and added them to the local administrators) and then rebooting the box did the job nicely. Our process was more or less manual: reviewing all currently running Windows services and…