Escalating privileges

Privilege escalation is where an attacker looks to gain access that extends beyond the scope of the exploited user's ability. There are two forms: horizontal privilege escalation and vertical privilege escalation. Horizontal privilege escalation is a term that's used for maintaining a current user's privileges while leveraging flaws in system policies, software, and file settings, which allows the current user to access other user resources, files, and services. This type of privilege access is commonplace in industrial control systems and in my experience, it can be enough to bring systems and processes to a grinding halt. Vertical privilege escalation, on the other hand, is the attacker's journey, whereby they move from a less privileged account through to a system admin or a domain admin account. Once an attacker has a domain admin account, they can wreak havoc inside of the compromised network and infrastructure.

In the previous section...