Hack the Box (HTB) machines walkthrough series — Hawk

Today, we will be continuing with our exploration of Hack the Box (HTB) machines as seen in previous articles. This walkthrough is of an HTB machine named Hawk.

HTB is an excellent platform that hosts machines belonging to multiple OSes. It also has some other challenges as well. Individuals have to solve the puzzle (simple enumeration plus pentest)  in order to log into the platform and download the VPN pack to connect to the machines hosted on the HTB platform.

Note: Only write-ups of retired HTB machines are allowed. The machine in this article, named Hawk, is retired.

The walkthrough

Let’s start with this machine.

1. Download the VPN pack for the individual user and use the guidelines to log into the HTB VPN.

2. The Hawk machine IP is 10.10.10.150.

3. We will adopt the same methodology of performing penetration testing as we have used previously. Let’s start with enumeration in order to learn as much about the machine as possible.

4. As usual, let’s start with the Nmap scan to gather more information about the services running on this machine. [CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]
<<nmap -sC -sV -oA Hawk 10.10.10.102>>

5. As we can see, we have ports 21, 22, 80 and 8082 open. All others are known ports, so let’s dig around on port 8082. Running the Nmap scan indicates that it is a H2 service.
<<nmap -sC -sV -p 8082 10.10.10.102>>

6. OK, so let’s start enumerating with discovered ports. Let’s ftp on port 21. It looks like an anonymous login worked on this box.
<<ftp 10.10.10.102>>

7. Enumerating the directory contents reveals a .drupal.txt.enc file.
<<ls -la>>
<<get .drupal.txt.enc>>

8. Transfer the file to the attacking box. Examining the (Read more...)