Privilege escalation is the path from a limited foothold to more access. You do not need to exploit a kernel bug; a misconfigured service or a careless permission is often enough.
Two directions
- Vertical: user to administrator, or application account to domain admin.
- Horizontal: one user to another user at the same level, often through stolen tokens or weak object checks.
Linux patterns
- A SUID binary that runs a shell or an editable script as root.
- A
sudorule that allows a command with an escape. - A cron job running a script from a writable directory.
- A service running as root with a weak configuration file.
- Credentials left in environment files or shell history.
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