Lion Cipher Lab
Find (and fix) privilege-escalation paths on your own Linux lab
- Penetration Testing / Red Team
- Beginner
- ~45 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
Attackers rarely land as root. They get in as some low-privilege user — a web-app account, a compromised login — and then look for a misconfiguration that lets them climb to full control of the machine. That climb is privilege escalation, and it almost always exploits something an administrator left wrong: an over-broad sudo rule, a dangerous SUID binary, a writable file that runs as root. The best way to understand these paths is to hunt for them on a machine you own, see why each one is dangerous, and fix it — which is exactly what a defender does when hardening a host. Learning to…
What you'll learn
- what privilege escalation is and why it matters
- enumerating a host for privesc misconfigurations
- reading dangerous sudo rules and SUID binaries
- using GTFOBins to understand a risky binary
- fixing the misconfigurations you find
Steps in this lab
- The one rule, and what privilege escalation is
- Check your sudo rights: sudo -l
- Read a dangerous entry with GTFOBins
- Find SUID binaries
- Enumerate systematically with a tool
- Fix what you found
- Why hunting your own box is the point