Hack the Box (HTB) machines walkthrough series — Help

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 Help.

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 Help, 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 “Help” machine IP is 10.10.10.121.

3. We will adopt the same methodology of performing penetration testing as we have used in previous articles. 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 learn more about the services running on this machine. [CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]
<<nmap -sC -sV -oA Help 10.10.10.121>>

5. We have 2 ports opened, 22 and 80. Let’s enumerate port 80.

6. Enumerating port 80 gives the Ubuntu page.

7. Let’s move forward and try to brute-force the directories. Using gobuster reveals a directory named “/support”, as shown below.
<<gobuster -u http://10.10.10.121 -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirbuster/directory-list-2.3-medium.txt -t 30>>

8. Enumerating this directory gives a nice support HelpDeskZ portal page.

9. Directly searching for any HelpDeskZ exploit found a hit which is related to a file upload chained with RCE.

10. It also looks like this exploit was available on Searchsploit. So we’ll copy that to the (Read more...)