Hands-On Penetration Testing with Kali NetHunter

Escalating privileges

After compromising an operating system, such as Windows, you would have limited privileges on the system. This means if you try to execute certain commands or run applications, the built-in security will deny such actions. If you're able to compromise a user account, it might be a standard user with limited privileges as well. As a penetration tester, we would like the ability to execute any command and applications on a victim machine without any sort of restrictions.

Therefore, depending on the objectives of the penetration test, you may be required to gain "administrator" privileges in a Windows environment, or root-level access on Linux-based systems.