Hack the Box (HTB) machines walkthrough series — Aragog

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 Aragog.

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 Aragog, 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 Aragog machine IP is 10.10.10.78.

3. We’ll use the same methodology of performing penetration testing as we’ve used before. Let’s start with enumeration in order to learn more about the machine.

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 Aragog 10.10.10.78>>

5. Only port 21 and 22 are visible from the initial nmap scan.

6. Let’s start the enumeration with port 21. Getting into port 21 via anonymous, we can see that there is a test.txt file. Let’s download the file to the system.
<<ftp 10.10.10.78>>
<<ls>>
<<get test.txt>>

7. It looks the file defines a subnet mask. It will be interesting to see if this will be used in further investigation.

8. Browsing the machine over port 80 reveals the default Apache page.

9. Let’s start directory enumeration with gobuster.
<<gobuster -u http://10.10.10.78 -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirbuster/directory-list-2.3-medium.txt -t (Read more...)