Multi stage attacks on networks?

Hi
        I am a Ph.D. student studying network security at Princeton
University. I am trying to see if attacker can use a series of
vulnerabilities to take over a particular resource. Has there been prior
work on this topic earlier? Can someone give me a real example where the
adversary actually uses a series of vulnerabilities to break into a
resource?

        May be he uses the webserver in DMZ and then uses it to get access
to fileserver and then uses it to compromise something else?

thanks for your time,
Sudhakar.

Sudhakar Govindavajhala Department of Computer Science
Graduate Student, Princeton University
                      (o) +1 609 258 1798
               http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~sudhakar
Received on Apr 30 2004