That’s not quite as bad as an RCE, which means that someone who isn’t logged onto your computer at all can get unauthorised access in the first place, giving them a beachhead for further cybercrime.īut an EoP on its own is bad enough, not least because an RCE exploit that only just gets a cybercriminal in, perhaps with no more powers than a guest user, can often be combined with an EoP to achieve what a crook would consider “complete compromise”. You can stop, start and even install new system services, mess with firewall settings, alter files in the Windows folder, change boot-time security settings, and generally do all the things that IT has spent ages trying to make sure that you can’t, whether deliberately or by mistake. If you’re logged in, say, as RegularUser, you can do yourself plenty of harm by deleting your own files, messing with your own applications, downloading inappropriate files, and so on.īut if you can wrangle access to the SYSTEM account, you will find yourself on a similar footing to Windows itself, and you can wreak much more havoc.
As you will remember from last time, an EoP means that someone who is already logged onto your computer as a regular, unprivileged user can silently and unlawfully boost themselves to Admin or SYSTEM level.
