What is password mining?

You should already be familiar with the password mining process and its importance as we covered this in Chapter 7, Windows Password Mining; however, there are a few nuances in the process when dealing with Linux systems.

Password mining is the process of searching for and enumerating encrypted or clear-text passwords stored in persistent or volatile memory on the target system. The primary objective of this process revolves around identifying potentially useful user account and application passwords that can expand our authority over a target system and potentially provide us with elevated privileges.

Given the nature of Linux distributions and deployment use cases, this process will differ from target to target. It is therefore important to have a good understanding of how and where passwords, both encrypted and clear-text, are stored on Linux systems.

It is also important to understand that this process relies on a series of vulnerabilities that...