Privilege escalation is the process of exploiting a vulnerability in a system or piece of software to gain access to restricted resources. This results in unauthorized access to resources.
Two types of privilege escalation are possible:
- Horizontal: This occurs in conditions where we are able to execute commands or functions that were not originally intended for the user to access.
- Vertical: This kind of exploitation occurs when we are able to escalate our privileges to a higher user level, for example, getting the root on the system.
In this chapter, we will learn about the different ways of escalating our privileges on Linux and Windows systems, as well as gaining access to an internal network.
We will cover the following recipes:
- Spawning a TTY shell
- Looking for weaknesses
- Horizontal escalation
- Vertical escalation
- Node hopping – pivoting
- Privilege...