Requires that the cracker has access to a machine. The cracker then runs an exploit script granting him or her administrator or root access. A number of sites on the Internet give newbies in the Computer Underground (called scriptkiddies) an idea of how vulnerabilities can be exploited in just a few steps. Though a number of techniques can be used to accomplish this task, the most common are misconfiguration, poor SUID, buffer overflows, and temp files.

See Also: Buffer Overflows; Exploit; Misconfiguration Problems; Poor SUID; Temp Files.