Privilege Escalation
This phase comes after a Threat Actor has already identified a target and scanned and exploited its vulnerabilities using the previously discussed tools and scanning tools. The focus of the Threat Actor in this phase is to maintain access and move around in the network while remaining undetected. In order to achieve this freedom of movement without being detected, a Threat Actor needs to perform privilege escalation.
This is an attack that will grant the Threat Actor an elevated level of access to a network, its connected systems, and devices:
Figure 4: The delivered weapon will be installed to targets
Privilege escalation can be done in two ways: vertical, and horizontal, as shown in Table 1:
| Vertical privilege escalation | Horizontal privilege escalation |
|
Threat Actor moves from one account to another that has a higher level of authority |
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