Every sudo privilege escalation you’ll ever read online ends the same way: run sudo -l, spot a binary, look it up on
GTFOBins, get a root shell. That’s one shape. I’ve rooted a lot of boxes through sudo over the years, and when I went
back through my own notes to see how many were actually that shape, the answer was: fewer than half.
sudo is not a vulnerability. It’s a delegation tool — a way for an admin to say “this user may run this thing as
that user.” Every line in a sudoers file was written by a real person solving a real problem, usually under time
pressure. The misconfiguration is never “sudo is broken.” It’s the gap between what someone needed and what they
actually granted — and that gap shows up in five recognizable shapes. Only one of them is the GTFOBins one.
This is a walk through all five, each with a retired box that shows it in the wild.