Hack the Box (HTB) machines walkthrough series — Nest, part 1

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 Nest. This is the first half.

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 Nest, is retired.

The walkthrough

Let’s start with this machine.

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1. Download the VPN pack for the individual user and use the guidelines to log into the HTB VPN.
2. The Nest machine IP is 10.10.10.178.
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. As usual, let’s start with the Nmap scan to learn more information about the services running on this machine.
5. As we can see, multiple ports are listed. As a best practice, I always do a full port scan to see if there are more ports that got discovered. In this case, it was the case, and we found basic ports such as 21 and 80 on full port sweep. [CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]
   <<nmap -sC -sV -oA Nest 10.10.10.178>>
   
   
6. Since we have got a very limited port, let’s start enumeration on port 445 using smbclient. It was found that we can list the shares on the machine.
   
7. We can also enter the Data share on the target machine.
   
8. As we can see, there are three folders under the Data folder. Let’s start enumeration on (Read more...)