Conclusion and lessons learned

We learned about the two approaches of privilege escalation: horizontal and vertical. Some attackers will use the horizontal privilege escalation methods because they are less taxing. However, veteran hackers who have a good understanding of the systems that they target will use vertical privilege escalation methods. This chapter has gone through some of the specific methods within these two Escalation categories.

It was clear from most methods that hackers had to utilize legitimate processes and services in order to escalate privileges. This is because most systems are built using the least privilege concept, that being that users are purposefully given the least privileges that they require to accomplish their roles. Only the legitimate services and processes are given high-level privileges and, therefore, attackers have to compromise them in most cases.