Kali Linux Web Penetration Testing Cookbook - Second Edition

Privilege escalation on Linux

For some penetration testing projects, getting a web-shell may be enough in terms of exploitation and demonstration of the impact of a vulnerability. In some other cases, we may need to go beyond that to expand our level of privilege within that server or to use it to pivot to other hosts in the network.

In this first recipe about privilege escalation, we will draw on the previous recipe where we uploaded and executed a reverse shell to our attacking machine and use tools included in Kali Linux to gain administrative access on the server.