Privilege Escalation Techniques

Chapter 12: Scheduled Tasks

One of the most important privilege escalation vectors on Linux is exploiting misconfigured scheduled tasks, also known as cron jobs. This chapter will focus on the process of enumerating the scheduled tasks running on the target system, analyzing them for misconfigurations, and exploiting them to elevate our privileges.

We will start this chapter by looking at how Linux implements scheduled tasks with cron, after which we will take a look at how to escalate our privileges through cron paths. We will then take a look at how to exploit cron wildcards to elevate our privileges, before exploring the process of escalating our privileges via cron file overwrites.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main ...