SolidState

SOLIDSTATE

- Layout for this exercise:






1 - INTRODUCTION

- The goal of this exercise is to develop a hacking process for the vulnerable machine SolidState, what is a retired machine from the Hack The Box pentesting platform:

https://www.hackthebox.eu



2 - ENUMERATION

- SolidState's IP is 10.10.10.51:




- Scanning all ports with Nmap there are 6 open ports:



- Connecting with the browser:



- Scanning deeply those 6 open ports:




- So the James Remote Admin 2.3.2 application is running on port 4555, what is vulnerable to this exploit:

https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/35513



- Reading the content we discover default credentials root:root :




3 - EXPLOITATION

- The connection to port 4555 using credentials root:root is successful:





- HELP lists available commands:



- Listing users:





- Resetting passwords:




- Now, using these new passwords let's connect to the POP3 service running on port 110:



- users james, thomas and mailadmin don't have messages to be retrieved:




- user john has and interesting message from james, where they talk about user mindy's credentials:



- However, the most interesting task is to retrieve user mindy's two messages:








- At the second message we can read the password P@55W0rd1!2@

- Using this password to try an SSH connection for mindy:



4 - READING THE 1st FLAG

- Reading user.txt:




5 - PRIVILEGE ESCALATION

- However this shell is no very powerful because a lot of essential commands are restricted:




- To start a Privilege Escalation process let's copy locally the script of the 35513 exploit, where the payload can be modified according to our own interest:



- Giving execution permissions:




- Setting a Netcat listening session after the modified payload:





- Running 35513.py against SolidState's IP:



- So to get the payload executed we need that somebody logs in, for instance user mindy:





- As a consequence there is a reverse shell that can be improved successfully:





- This shell allows more commands than the previous one:

 


- At this point let's look for any process being run by users either mindy, james, ...:







- It seems that a process inside folder /opt is being run with root privileges, and going there we discover that tmp.py is owned by root and sldo it is world writable:




- Reading tmp.py:




- Modifying tmp.py so that a shell is remotely spawn:








- After 3 minutes a root shell is spwan:




- Checking that tmp.py is scheduled as a crontab job every 3 minutes:





6 - CAPTURING THE 2nd FLAG

- Reading root.txt:

Poison

POISON

- Layout for this exercise:




1 - INTRODUCTION

- The goal of this exercise is to develop a hacking process for the vulnerable machine Poison, what is a retired machine from the Hack The Box pentesting platform:

https://www.hackthebox.eu


2 - ENUMERATION

- Poison's IP is 10.10.10.84:

- Scanning with Nmap it seems there are just 2 open ports and the Operating System is FreeBSD:





- Going deeper with ports SSH 22 and HTTP 80:




- Connecting with the browser we find a local .php scripts test application:




- Checking ini.php:








- info.php:





- phpinfo.php:








- listfiles.php lets us know that there is a promising text file called pwdbackup.txt:






- By the way, before going ahead, we detect the presence of an LFI vulnerability, though this will not be our vector attack:






- Anyway from /etc/passwd we learn the existence of a user called charix.

- Reading pwdbackup.txt we find a 13 times base64 encrypted password:




- Copying it locally to the attacking machine:



- Now, applying by 13 times the base64 decoding process we find a password:

https://codebeautify.org/base64-decode




3 - EXPLOITATION

- This password allows an SSH connection for user charix:







4 - CAPTURING THE 1st FLAG

- Reading user.txt:








5 - PRIVILEGE ESCALATION

- Aside from user.txt there is a secret.zip that we try to unzip unsuccessfully:




- A file secret is created, but it is empty and useless so it's probably a good idea to remove it:





- Let's move secret.zip to Kali:






- Unzipping secret.zip with the password found before:







- Now it seems that the file secret could be a valid password, it's not empty at least:




- Let's transfer it from Kali to Poison, so that it will be used later:








- At this point of the exploitation sockstat (FreeBSD command) lists all open sockets (option -4 for IPv4):

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sockstat&sektion=1&manpath=freebsd-release-ports






- Poison is listening locally at ports 5801 and 5901 for a VNC (Virtual Network Computing) connection:






- However both ports seem closed externally, so we cannot access directly to them from Kali:





- The solution would be to use SSH Tunneling, what is explained thoroughly here:

https://www.hackingarticles.in/comprehensive-guide-on-ssh-tunneling/





- vncviewer is the client for the remote VNC virtual desktop connection:






6 - CAPTURING THE 2nd FLAG

- Reading root.txt:





- Also, root.txt can be transferred to Kali with Netcat:








- Netstat lists active connections for Poison: