Lateral Movement and Pivoting

Group of techniques used by attackers to move around a network. It is part of a cycle where attackers access new machines and elevate privileges, and extract credentials if possible.

Before going further we need to understand the definition of User Access Control (UAC). UAC is simply a security feature that helps prevent unauthorized changes to the computer. It does this by asking for permission before allowing any certain actions or changes that require administrator rights.

This table below is an example usage of UAC:

Local Administrator		Domain Administrator
Local Administrator Group	Group	Domain Administrator Group
Cannot execute remote admin tasks (RPC, SMB, WinRM). Can only RDP *Note: built-in Administrator account is not affected by this	Privileges	Full admin rights and remotely like using RPC, SMB, WinRM, PsExec
Limited unless UAC is disabled or bypassed	Lateral Movement Impact	More dangerous xD