Lateral Movement via DLL Hijacking
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This is a quick write-up that outlines how it's possible to leverage DLL hijacking for lateral movement as described by in
Fire up some Windows VM and inspect it with ProcMon to find any DLLs that could be hijacked. Usually there's many opportunities on any given Windows host. To find some target DLLs, fire launch procmon, set filters to path ends with .dll && result is NAME NOT FOUND and you will see something like this:
In these notes, we will be targeting the missing DLL located at:
Now, you need to create a DLL that contains your payload - i.e. Cobalt Strike beacon. This is the DLL you will plant on the target system in c:\windows\system32\sharedres.dll, because it's missing and svchost.exe is trying to load it.
In this situation, it is strongly advised to ensure that your malicious DLL to not only executes your payload, but also exports the same functions the DLL you are hijacking exports, so find the real DLL on your system or on the internet to check what exports it contains and make sure your DLL has those exports. Afteral, the process that will load your DLL is loading it for a reason - it will want to use some functions that that DLL and will crash if it does not find them.
It is strongly advised to ensure that your malicious DLL exports the same functions as the DLL you are hijacking, otherwise you may crash the process or compromise the system's stability.
Once you have your malicious DLL ready, you can now hijack the missing DLL on the target system by copying your DLL over to the remote machine via, say SMB:
At this point, you just wait for the svchost.exe to attempt to load the c:\windows\system32\sharedres.dll. When that happens, your payload will be executed.
For detection ideas, check out the link in the references.
See my lab on and check out a tool by that automates DLL proxying and more.
