Comment by hackernudes
16 hours ago
LPE = local privilege escalation
Too many darn acronyms. This one wasn't too hard to figure out from context but I wish people would define acronyms before using them!
16 hours ago
LPE = local privilege escalation
Too many darn acronyms. This one wasn't too hard to figure out from context but I wish people would define acronyms before using them!
LPE is a very well-known acronym within the security community, it's not purely academic or obscure or anything.
I agree that it would be a good idea to define it explicitly when writing for a broader audience, but I don't think it's particularly egregious that they didn't. It's certainly something I could see myself forgetting.
Then again, the whole writeup appears to be AI-generated, so...
It is nowhere near this. There are very few acronyms in the IT world that are actually well-known outside of it. LPE is less well-known than LVAD or MCU.
https://www.acronymfinder.com/Information-Technology/MCU.htm...
https://www.acronymfinder.com/LVAD.html
https://www.acronymfinder.com/Information-Technology/LPE.htm...
Sure, but the target audience of copy.fail is surely not the security community but regular sysadmins who probably don't otherwise follow as closely.
I would absolutely expect a sysadmin in particular to know and understand the term and acronym.
Good writing for a broad audience requires it. Unfortunately the LLMs don't tend to adopt this guideline.
it’s a CVE write up; the audience for these knows what an LPE is.
That’s very optimistic. I’d bet there are an order of magnitude more people wondering how exposed they are than security researchers reading this.
3 replies →
I've read many CVEs (somehow that acronym is ok... heh) but have never seen LPE despite being familiar with the concept.
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Content at the OP link http://copy.fail seems fairly different from any normal CVE I’ve seen.
To be fair, I just consulted 3 cybersecurity glossaries (SANS.org, NIST CSRC, Huntress), and none of them list "LPE" nor "Local Privilege Escalation".
If you type "LPE" into English Wikipedia's search bar, and press "Enter", you'll be sent to a disambiguation page which contains a link to the relevant article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPE
I don't know why, but newer writers have never been taught to expand their acronyms on first use. I blame the US education system.