Hack the Box (HTB) machines walkthrough series — Popcorn

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 Popcorn.

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 Popcorn, 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 Popcorn machine IP is 10.10.10.6.

3. We will adopt our usual methodology of performing penetration testing. Let’s start with enumeration in order to gain as much information about the machine as possible.

4. We’ll start with the Nmap scan to learn more about the services running on this machine. [CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]
<<nmap -sC -sV -oA Popcorn 10.10.10.6>>

5. As we can see, ports 22 and 80 are detected. Let’s start enumeration of these ports.

6. Below is the default page for Popcorn. Nothing interesting on this page.

7. Let’s continue the drill and enumerate the directories with Gobuster.
<<gobuster -u http://10.10.10.6 -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirbuster/directory-list-2.3-medium.txt -t 50>>

8. We can see multiple interesting directories being detected. As soon as I saw “torrent,” upload and execute comes to mind. Let’s see if that’s possible.

9. Below is where the /torrent page redirects to. It looks like if we’re going to do anything, we need to login.

10. Let’s register a user and (Read more...)