Hack the Box (HTB) machines walkthrough series — Haystack
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 Haystack.
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.
The walkthrough
Note: Only write-ups of retired HTB machines are allowed. The machine in this article, named Haystack, is retired.
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 Haystack machine IP is 10.10.10.115.
3. We will adopt our usual methodology of performing penetration testing. Let’s start with enumeration in order to gather 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 Haystack 10.10.10.115>>
5. As we can see, we have ports 22, 80 and 9200 available. Let’s start enumeration on these.
6. Beginning with port 80, we can see the web page below, which is apt given the name of the machine. There is also a hint about a certain phrase about where needles can be found.
7. Let’s jump to the more interesting port, 9200. Below is the output. From the icon, it looks to be an Elasticsearch component, but let’s go deeper.
8. Enumerating this directory with Gobuster reveals another interesting directory: “quotes”.
<<gobuster -u http://10.10.10.115:9200 -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirbuster/directory-list-2.3-medium.txt -t 20>>
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Infosec Resources authored by Security Ninja. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/infosecResources/~3/nqRO8pY0HxQ/
