Chapter 1: Introduction to Privilege Escalation

Privilege escalation is a vital element of the attack life cycle and is a major determinant in the overall success of a penetration test.

The importance of privilege escalation in the penetration testing process cannot be overstated or overlooked. Developing your privilege escalation skills will mark you out as a good penetration tester. The ability to enumerate information from a target system and utilize this information to identify potential misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that can be exploited to elevate privileges is an essential skill set for any penetration tester.

This chapter aims to give you a clearer picture and understanding of the privilege escalation process and will act as a formal introduction to the various types of privilege escalation techniques, and how the process differs between Windows and Linux systems.

To fully understand and leverage the various privilege escalation tools and techniques, you first need to understand how permissions and privileges are implemented on various operating systems and how these differences in design and implementation affect the privilege escalation process as a whole.

By the end of this chapter, you will have a clear understanding of what privilege escalation is, and you will also understand how permissions are implemented on Windows and Linux systems and get a brief introduction to the various privilege escalation techniques that we will be exploring in depth in the upcoming chapters.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• What is privilege escalation?
• How permissions and privileges are assigned
• Understanding the differences between privilege escalation on Windows and Linux
• Exploring the types of privilege escalation attack