Remote Desktop Services Shadowing – Beyond the Shadowed Session

From time to time in certain situations one needs to have a possibility to view a customer’s user screen to make some proofed screenshots or to get access to an open GUI application window which contains secrets for lateral movement while the legitimate user is connected via RDP and you don’t want to kick them out of the session.

There is a number of third-party software such as VNC, radmin, TeamViewer, etc. on the market to achieve it, but it involves additional actions such as binary delivery, its installation and so on. Moreover, these actions are too noisy and leave a lot of garbage on a remote host.

Luckily, Windows-based systems have an awesome built-in feature (as part of Remote Desktop Protocol) that is unfairly ignored or forgotten. It is called Remote Desktop Services Shadowing.

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