Hack the Box (HTB) machines walkthrough series — SecNotes

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 SecNotes.

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 SecNotes, 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 SecNotes machine IP is 10.10.10.97.

3. We will adopt the same methodology of performing penetration testing as we’ve previously used. Let’s start with enumeration in order to gain as much information 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 SecNotes 10.10.10.97>>

5. We can see that ports 80 and 445 are only opened from outside in a default scan. Let’s begin enumeration on port 80.

6. We have created a dummy user titled “lhm” and below is what we get. OK, so the username is reflected. That gets me going on SQLi.

7. After a few tries, we find that the one below worked, and we get some notes under Mimi’s section.

8. Building from previous discovery, let’s try to access the above share, since port 445 is also opened.
<<smbclient \\10.10.10.97\new-site -U tyler>>

9. But all we get below (Read more...)