Generally speaking, an exploit is a piece of code or data that takes advantage of a bug in software to perform an unintended behavior. There are several ways exploits can be classified. First of all, apart from the vulnerability that they target, when we talk about exploits, it is vitally important to figure out the actual result of the action being performed. Here are some of the most common types:
- Denial of Service (DoS): Here, the exploit aims to crash either an application or the whole system, and this way disrupt its normal operation.
- Privilege escalation: In this case, the main purpose of the exploit is to elevate privileges to give the attacker greater abilities, for example, access to more sensitive information.
- Unauthorized data access: This group is sometimes merged with privilege escalation category, from which it differs mainly in scope and vector. Here, the attacker gets access to sensitive information that's unavailable in a normal situation, with...
