Privilege Escalation consists of techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network. Adversaries can often enter and explore a network with unprivileged access but require elevated permissions to follow through on their objectives. Common approaches are to take advantage of system weaknesses, misconfigurations, and vulnerabilities. These techniques include hooking into application programming interface (API) functions used by processes to redirect calls for execution and privilege escalation means. This type of hooking involves redirecting calls to these functions via import address table (IAT) hooking.”]
Source: https://collaborate.mitre.org/attackics/index.php/Privilege_Escalation