"RID Hijacking" technique lets hackers assign admin rights to guest and other low-level accounts.
A security researcher from Colombia has found a way of assigning admin rights and gaining boot persistence on Windows PCs that's simple to execute and hard to stop --all the features that hackers and malware authors are looking for from an exploitation technique.
What's more surprising, is that the technique was first detailed way back in December 2017, but despite its numerous benefits and ease of exploitation, it has not received either media coverage nor has it been seen employed in malware campaigns.
Discovered by Sebastián Castro, a security researcher for
CSL, the technique targets one of the parameters of Windows user accounts known as the Relative Identifier (RID).
The RID is a code added at the end of account security identifiers (SIDs) that describes that user's permissions group. There are several RIDs available, but the most common ones are 501 for the standard guest account, and 500 for admin accounts.