Special Privileges and Security Descriptors
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A similar result to adding a user to the Backup Operators group can be achieved without modifying any group membership.
Special groups are only special because the operating system assigns them specific privileges by default. Privileges are simply the capacity to do a task on the system itself.
Complete list of all privileges:
In the case of the Backup Operators group, it has the following two privileges assigned by default:
SeBackupPrivilege: The user can read any file in the system, ignoring any DACL in place.
SeRestorePrivilege: The user can write any file in the system, ignoring any DACL in place.
We can assign such privileges to any user, independent of their group memberships. To do so, we can use the secedit command. First, we will export the current configuration to a temporary file:
We open the file and add our user to the lines in the configuration regarding the SeBackupPrivilege and SeRestorePrivilege:
We finally convert the .inf file into a .sdb file which is then used to load the configuration back into the system:
You should now have a user with equivalent privileges to any Backup Operator. The user still can't log into the system via WinRM, so let's do something about it.
Instead of adding the user to the Remote Management Users group, we'll change the security descriptor associated with the WinRM service to allow jack to connect.
Think of a security descriptor as an ACL but applied to other system facilities.
To open the configuration window for WinRM's security descriptor, you can use the following command in Powershell (you'll need to use the GUI session for this):
This will open a window where you can add jack and assign it full privileges to connect to WinRM:
