Psexec can be pretty dangerous. Psexec.exe -i -s gives you access to the NTAUTHORITY/SYSTEM account, which is higher than Administrator. One time at work I was trying to do something and was getting permission denied so I decided to use that to get around the problem, I got to spend the afternoon talking to our security administrator because he got a bunch of alerts from our antivirus.
Never thought about that, but since these tools just work, when you copy them to your PC… how does psexec do that? It’d either need you to be an administrator (and then it’s not really a privilege escalation as you could have registered any program into the task scheduler or as a service to run as SYSTEM) or it’d need a delegate service, that should only be available when you use an installer - which again wasn’t was has been done when just copying the tool.
You need Administrative permissions for psexec. It uploads a file to the target computer’s \admin$ share (just C:\Windows) and starts a service to execute it. Services run as SYSTEM so that’s why you get those privileges.
(Hah, I forgot your message while typing mine and just copied you :)
Edit: fixed c$ to admin$
