Day 11: Auditing Linux Privilege Escalation Vectors 🕵️‍♂️

Today, I moved into the "Red Team" mindset. If you want to build a secure system, you need to understand how an attacker thinks when they are trying to escalate privileges from a low-level user to root . 🛠️ The Security Auditor's Toolkit Today’s session focused on identifying and testing specific vulnerabilities. Here are the core vectors I audited: 1. PATH Hijacking If a system script runs tar instead of /usr/bin/tar , an attacker can manipulate their $PATH to point to a malicious binary. The Audit Rule: Always use absolute paths in your cron jobs and service configuration files. 2. The SUID Trap SUID binaries run with the privileges of their owner. The Dangerous Binaries: If an attacker can execute a shell from within binaries like vim , find , or tar that have the SUID bit set, they gain root access instantly. Verification: I used this command to audit the system: find / -perm -4000 -type f 2>/dev/null 3. Cron & Group Vulnerabilities The "Golden Rule" of escalation: Writable Script