Cascade - Hack The Box
Cascade was a simple and straightforward enumeration-focused Windows box. We find the credentials for the initial account in a custom LDAP attibute then enumerate SMB shares, finding VNC credentials which can be decrypted. With those creds we find an SQlite database that contains encrypted credentials for yet another user. To decrypt the password we have to reverse a simple .NET application located on one of the shares. The final privesc involves getting the admin password from tombstone, a feature in AD that keeps deleted objects for a period of time.
Sauna is a good beginner-friendly AD box that covers a few key Windows exploitation topics like AS-REP roasting, enumeration for credentials, using tools such as Powerview to find attack paths, DCsync and Pass-The-Hash techniques.
I initially thought for Book that the goal was to get the administrator’s session cookie via an XSS but instead we have to create a duplicate admin account by using a long email address that gets truncated to the existing one. Once we have access to the admin page we then exploit an XSS vulnerability in the PDF generator to read SSH keys for the low priv user. We priv esc using a race condition vulnerability in logrotate so we can backdoor /etc/bash_completion.d.
Forwardslash starts off like most classic Hack The Box machines with some enumeration of vhosts, files and directories with gobuster then we use a Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability to reach a protected dev directory only accessible from localhost. After finding credentials and getting a shell, we’ll analyze and exploit a small backup program to read files as user pain and find more credentials. In the spirit of Team Unintended, instead of solving the crypto challenge to get root I used the sudo commands available to me to upload and mount my own Luks container and execute a SUID bash binary.
Monteverde was an Active Directory box on the easier side that requires enumerating user accounts then password spraying to get an initial shell. Then we find more credentials looking around the box and eventually find the MSOL account password which we use to get administrator access.
Professional Offensive Operations (P.O.O.) was the first endgame lab released by Hack The Box. It contained five different flags spread across two Windows machines. The initial part required some tricky recon with ds_store and IIS short names to find a MSSQL DB connection string. We then had to pivot by abusing the trust between MSSQL linked servers. The lab also had kerberoasting, password cracking, mimikatz and attack path enumeration with Bloodhound in it.
We start Resolute with enumeration of the domain user accounts using an anonymous bind session to the LDAP server and find an initial password in the description field of one of the account. Password spraying the password against all the discovered accounts give us an initial shell then we pivot to another user after finding creds in a console history file. The priv esc is pretty cool: we’re in the DNS admins group so we can reconfigure the DNS service to run an arbitrary DLL as SYSTEM.
The Obscurity box has a vulnerable Python web application running. After finding the source code from a secret directory we find that the exec call can be command injected to get a shell as www-data. Then we have to solve a simple crypto challenge to retrieve an encryption key that decrypts a file containing the robert user’s password. We finally get root by exploiting a race condition in a python script so that we can copy the /etc/shadow file and crack the root password.
OpenAdmin is an easy box that starts with using an exploit for the OpenNetAdmin software to get initial RCE. Then we get credentials from the database config and can re-use them to connect by SSH. We then find another web application with an hardcoded SHA512 hash in the PHP code for the login page. After cracking it we’re able to log in and obtain an encrypted SSH key that we have to crack. After getting one more shell, we can run nano as root with sudo and spawn a shell as root.
Control runs a vulnerable PHP web application that controls access to the admin page by checking the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header. By adding the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header with the right IP address we can access the admin page and exploit an SQL injection to write a webshell and get RCE. After pivoting to another user with the credentials found in the MySQL database, we get SYSTEM access by modifying an existing service configuration from the registry.