Maintaining Access (Red Teaming)

Once access is gained, focus shifts to maintaining access and escalating (elevating) privileges within the system.

Privilege Escalation

Most often, after gaining access, an attacker will not have full system privileges. Privilege escalation if the methodical process of identifying weaknesses within a system that can be exploited to grant full administrative access and permission to the attacker. There are two types of privilege escalation: 

1. Horizontal Privilege Escalation - The attacker moves laterally across accounts of similar privileges.

2. Vertical Privilege Escalation - The attacker moves vertically upward from a low-privileged account to a higher-privileged account.