Chained exploitation is the practice of combining multiple weaknesses in sequence to reach a larger objective. One bug or misconfiguration may only provide limited access, but when an attacker links several issues together—such as weak credentials, an exposed service, and an authorization flaw—the result can be initial access, privilege escalation, lateral movement, or full compromise.
This matters in cyber security because many environments are resilient against single failures yet fragile when defenses are bypassed step by step. Attackers use chained exploitation to cross security boundaries that would otherwise stop a one-off exploit. Defenders look for it by testing attack paths end to end, hardening identity controls, reducing exposed services, segmenting networks, and monitoring for suspicious progress across stages. In practice, the risk is not just whether one weakness exists, but whether several can be linked into a working intrusion path.