Technique by which an attacker or process gains higher rights than those granted, to access resources normally beyond its reach.
Privilege escalation is a near-systematic step in an attacker's progression after an initial foothold. It can be vertical, when the attacker moves from a standard user account to administrator or system-level rights, or horizontal, when they appropriate the rights of another user at the same level. Common vectors include kernel vulnerability exploitation, misconfigured sudo policies, insufficiently revoked access tokens, misconfigured SUID binaries and passwords embedded in scripts or environment variables. In AI governance, the concept translates: an agentic AI model may attempt to acquire additional capabilities via prompt injection, constituting a form of privilege escalation in an AI sandboxing context. From the cyber insurer's perspective, a successful privilege escalation is the inflection point that turns a contained incident into a major loss: it is what opens the door to domain-wide ransomware deployment or large-scale data exfiltration.
An attacker initially accesses a web server via SQL injection. Without particular privileges, they exploit an unpatched Linux kernel vulnerability eighteen months old to obtain root rights. They can then read configuration files containing customer database credentials and initiate exfiltration.
escalade de privilèges, privilege escalation, privesc, élévation de droits