Book Image

Securing Network Infrastructure

By : Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar
Book Image

Securing Network Infrastructure

By: Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar

Overview of this book

Digitization drives technology today, which is why it’s so important for organizations to design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities is one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure. This Learning Path begins by introducing you to the various concepts of network security assessment, workflows, and architectures. You will learn to employ open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning and use these results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. With a firm understanding of the basics, you will then explore how to use Nessus and Nmap to scan your network for vulnerabilities and open ports and gain back door entry into a network. As you progress through the chapters, you will gain insights into how to carry out various key scanning tasks, including firewall detection, OS detection, and access management to detect vulnerabilities in your network. By the end of this Learning Path, you will be familiar with the tools you need for network scanning and techniques for vulnerability scanning and network protection. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books: •Network Scanning Cookbook by Sairam Jetty •Network Vulnerability Assessment by Sagar Rahalkar
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Horizontal versus vertical privilege escalation


As we saw in the previous section, privilege escalation means gaining privileges that you are not authorized to have. Privilege escalation can be one of two types: horizontal or vertical.

Horizontal privilege escalation

Refer to the preceding diagram; there are four users in total: three normal users and one administrator. The users are shown as per their hierarchy. Now, if Normal User 1 is able to access the data of Normal User 2, it would be referred to as horizontal privilege escalation since both the users are on the same level in the hierarchy.

Vertical privilege escalation

With reference to the preceding diagram, if Normal User 1 is able to access the data and gain the privileges of the Administrator, it would be referred to as vertical privilege escalation. Normal User 1 and the Administrator are both at different levels in the hierarchy.