Phantom — Post-Exploitation & Container Escape

Who this is for

Operatives who have already finished Ghost or can do equivalent work on a fresh Linux box without thinking. Phantom assumes you already live in a shell — it will not teach you how to move a file or read a log. Phantom teaches what happens after, and it does not soften the 2026 reality: container runtimes, Linux capabilities, cgroups, Kubernetes service account tokens, and the specific runc, polkit, and sudo CVEs that still matter this year.

Difficulty tiers

Every Phantom level is labelled with one of four tiers. Each tier changes one thing about how you approach the level.

• RECRUITSingle primitive, mitigations off, reachable in under fifteen minutes if you know the concept. No hints. Five levels.
• OPERATORMitigations on, realistic 2026 hardening, 2–3 step chains. A single “show approach” hint unlocks after twenty minutes — category-only, never commands. Eight levels. This is the honest learning zone.
• PHANTOMRecent-CVE, chained, prestige-grade. No hints. Six levels covering the full modern container-escape surface.
• GRADUATEKubectl-free Kubernetes escape and the final chained graduation lab. Two levels. One earns you the Phantom Operative badge and a signed certificate.

What Phantom makes of you

Twenty public levels plus one hidden graduation. After Phantom you can:

• Walk onto any Linux host you have unprivileged access on and list the five realistic privilege-escalation paths in under ten minutes.
• Identify dangerous sudo rules (NOPASSWD, env_keep, wildcard injection, sudoedit quirks) and turn them into root in one attempt.
• Read Linux capabilities and know which ones are trivially exploitable with a one-liner script.
• Exploit classic local authentication services when they ship broken — the CVEs every Linux desktop inherits.
• Attach to a running root process with live code injection using the debugger interface alone.
• Recognise that you are inside a container, enumerate the container runtime, and pick the fastest escape path given the current misconfigurations.
• Escape a container through a mounted control socket, a “privileged” flag, a legacy cgroup interface, a runtime-level CVE replay, and the 2024 headline file-descriptor leak — five distinct techniques.
• Escape a Kubernetes pod using misconfigured host-namespace flags and land in the host’s init process namespace.
• Reach the Kubernetes API from inside a pod using only curl and a service account token, create a privileged workload, and harvest secrets from the control plane.
• Collect cloud IAM credentials from a node’s metadata service — and understand exactly where Phantom ends and the Mirage cloud track begins.

Levels

Phantom Operatives — Honor Roll →