During a penetration test, Nicole gets physical access to a Windows system and uses a system repair disk to copy cmd.exe to the %systemroot%\system32 directory while renaming it sethc.exe. When the system boots, she could log in as an unprivileged user, hit the Shift key five times, and open a command prompt with system-level access using sticky keys. Which of the following types of attack has she conducted?

Privilege escalation attacks focus on gaining additional privileges. In this case, Nicole used physical access to the system to modify it, allowing her to then conduct a privilege escalation attack as an unprivileged user. A Trojan would have required a file to act like it was desirable, a denial-of-service attack would have prevented access to a system or service, and swap files (or pagefiles) are drive spaces used to contain the contents of memory when memory runs low. Swap Files may contain sensitive data, but the term swapfile attack is not commonly used.