What is a privilege escalation attack?
A privilege escalation attack is the act of exploiting a security weakness in an application to gain access to resources that normally would have been protected from an application or user. This means that low-rights users can add files to a directory and overwrite the binaries installed therein, which will be then be unknowingly executed by a later user with higher level of rights. In other words, a guest user or a malicious program can effectively make changes to a computer that would normally be reserved to an administrator.
