Privilege escalations come in many shapes and sizes, it is not limited to software escaping a sandbox or to get into kernel mode, it is also explicitly used to refer to users of a system managing to leverage their normal access into a more powerful one.

But in context I was clearly talking about the former, because the topic is software exploiting CPU backdoors.

This can be combined with another exploit that allows the user to execute user code to achieve root on the ATM, so it's still troubling.