Recent Posts

Help - Hack The Box

Help showed that a small programming mistake in a web application can introduce a critical security vulnerability. In this case, the PHP application errors out when uploading invalid extensions such as PHP files but it doesn’t delete the file. Combined with a predictable filename generated based on MD5 of original file + epoch, we can get RCE.

Sizzle - Hack The Box

Sizzle was an amazing box that requires using some Windows and Active Directory exploitation techniques such as Kerberoasting to get encrypted hashes from Service Principal Names accounts. The privesc involves adding a computer to domain then using DCsync to obtain the NTLM hashes from the domain controller and then log on as Administrator to the server using the Pass-The-Hash technique.

Chaos - Hack The Box

Chaos starts with some enumeration to find a hidden wordpress site that contains a set of credentials for a webmail site. There’s some simple crypto we have to do to decrypt an attachment and find a hidden link on the site. We then exploit the PDF creation website which uses LaTeX and gain RCE. After getting a reverse shell, we do some digging into the user’s folders and find the webmin root credentials stored in the Firefox user profile.

Conceal - Hack The Box

Conceal uses IPSec to secure connectivity to the server and nothing is exposed by default except SNMP and IPSec. After finding the preshared key by enumerating with SNMP, we connect to the server, upload an ASP payload to gain RCE then privesc to SYSTEM using RottenPotato. Not a bad box overall, but the initial part of figuring out the IPSec configuration parameters took me a while to figure out/guess.

Lightweight - Hack The Box

Lightweight was a fun box that uses Linux capabilities set on tcpdump so we can capture packets on the loopback interface and find credentials in an LDAP session. We then find more credentials in the source code of the web application and finally priv esc to root by abusing a copy of the openssl program that all has Linux caps set on it.

Bighead - Hack The Box

Bighead was an extremely difficult box by 3mrgnc3 that starts with website enumeration to find two sub-domains and determine there is a custom webserver software running behind an Nginx proxy. We then need to exploit a buffer overflow in the HEAD requests by creating a custom exploit. After getting a shell, there’s some pivoting involved to access a limited SSH server, then an LFI to finally get a shell as SYSTEM. For the final stretch there is an NTFS alternate data stream with a Keepass file that contains the final flag.

Irked - Hack The Box

Irked is an easy box running a backdoored UnrealIRC installation. I used a Metasploit module to get a shell then ran steghide to obtain the SSH credentials for the low privileged user then got root by exploiting a vulnerable SUID binary.

Teacher - Hack The Box

Teacher uses the Moodle Open Source Learning platform and contains a vulnerability in the math formula that gives us RCE. The credentials for the Moodle application are found in a .png file that contains text instead of an actual image. After getting a shell with the math formula, we find the low privilege user credentials in the MySQL database. We then escalate to root by abusing a backup script running from a cronjob as root.