Hack the Box (HTB) machines walkthrough series — Luke

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 Luke.

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 Luke, 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 Luke machine IP is 10.10.10.137.

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 Luke 10.10.10.137>>

5. As we can see, the ports that are opened are 21, 22, 80, 3000 and 8000. Let’s start the enumeration on them.

6. Let’s start with FTP. While enumerating, we can see that there is a .txt file. We collect that file on the local box.
<<ftp 10.10.10.137>>
<<cd webapp>>
<<get for_Chihiro.txt>>

7. From the text file, it was evident that there are at least two users present, named Chihiro and Derry.

8. Let’s keep that in mind and move to other ports for further enumeration. The one below is for port 80. Nothing too interesting yet.

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