Kali Linux - Assuring Security by Penetration Testing - Second Edition

Chapter 10. Privilege Escalation

In the previous chapter, we exploited a target machine using the vulnerabilities found during the vulnerabilities mapping process. The goal of performing the exploitation is to get the highest privilege accounts available, such as administrator-level accounts in the Windows system or root-level accounts in the Unix system.

After you exploit a system, the next step you would want to take is to do a privilege escalation. Privilege escalation can be defined as the process of exploiting a vulnerability to gain elevated access to the system.

There are two types of privilege escalation as follows:

• Vertical privilege escalation: In this type, a user with lower privilege is able to access the application functions designed ...