0Pricing
Ethical Hacking Academy · Lesson

Cron Jobs and PATH

Scheduled task abuse.

Cron Jobs as a Vector

The cron daemon runs scheduled tasks, frequently as root. If you can influence what a root cron job executes — its script, its inputs, or how it resolves commands — you can run code as root.

Enumerating Cron

Read the system crontab and the cron directories. Note who runs each job and which scripts they call.

cat /etc/crontab
ls -la /etc/cron.d /etc/cron.daily /etc/cron.hourly
cat /var/spool/cron/crontabs/* 2>/dev/null

All lessons in this course

  1. Enumeration
  2. SUID and Sudo Abuse
  3. Cron Jobs and PATH
  4. Kernel Exploits
← Back to Ethical Hacking Academy