Not many people talk about serious Windows privilege escalation which is a shame. I think the reasons for this are probably (1) during pentesting engagements a low-priv shell is often all the proof you need for the customer, (2) in staged environments you often pop the Administrator account, (3) meterpreter makes you lazy (getsystem = lazy-fu), (4) build reviews to often end up being --> authenticated nessus scan, microsoft security baseline analyser…
Contrary to common perception Windows boxes can be really well locked down if they are configured with care. On top of that the patch time window of opportunity is small. So lets dig into the dark corners of the Windows OS and see if we can get SYSTEM.