In this chapter, we will be performing eavesdropping and privilege escalation on the target system where we already gained access to by having obtained the access credentials in the previous chapter. Knowledge of the Linux OS system and the Shell prompt is essential to achieve this.

Eavesdropping is the act of listening to the network flow between two computers by intercepting the traffic and capturing sensitive data. This technique is better known as sniffing the network traffic or MITM (man-in-the-middle) attack.

Privilege escalation is the act of intruding into a network in order to find a bug, design flaw, or configuration and exploiting it to gain elevated access to resources that are normally protected. There are two types of privilege escalations, horizontal and vertical.

Vertical privilege escalation requires the attacker to grant themselves higher privileges. For example, we have accessed a user account that has no privileges, and once...