SOLIDSTATE
- Layout for this exercise:
1 - INTRODUCTION
- The goal of this exercise is to develop a hacking process for the vulnerable machine SolidState, what is a retired machine from the Hack The Box pentesting platform:
https://www.hackthebox.eu
2 - ENUMERATION
- SolidState's IP is 10.10.10.51:
- Scanning all ports with Nmap there are 6 open ports:
- Connecting with the browser:
- Scanning deeply those 6 open ports:
- So the James Remote Admin 2.3.2 application is running on port 4555, what is vulnerable to this exploit:
https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/35513
- Reading the content we discover default credentials root:root :
3 - EXPLOITATION
- The connection to port 4555 using credentials root:root is successful:
- HELP lists available commands:
- Listing users:
- Resetting passwords:
- Now, using these new passwords let's connect to the POP3 service running on port 110:
- users james, thomas and mailadmin don't have messages to be retrieved:
- user john has and interesting message from james, where they talk about user mindy's credentials:
- However, the most interesting task is to retrieve user mindy's two messages:
- At the second message we can read the password P@55W0rd1!2@
- Using this password to try an SSH connection for mindy:
4 - READING THE 1st FLAG
- Reading user.txt:
5 - PRIVILEGE ESCALATION
- However this shell is no very powerful because a lot of essential commands are restricted:
- To start a Privilege Escalation process let's copy locally the script of the 35513 exploit, where the payload can be modified according to our own interest:
- Giving execution permissions:
- Setting a Netcat listening session after the modified payload:
- Running 35513.py against SolidState's IP:
- So to get the payload executed we need that somebody logs in, for instance user mindy:
- As a consequence there is a reverse shell that can be improved successfully:
- This shell allows more commands than the previous one:
- At this point let's look for any process being run by users either mindy, james, ...:
- It seems that a process inside folder /opt is being run with root privileges, and going there we discover that tmp.py is owned by root and sldo it is world writable:
- Reading tmp.py:
- Modifying tmp.py so that a shell is remotely spawn:
- After 3 minutes a root shell is spwan:
- Checking that tmp.py is scheduled as a crontab job every 3 minutes:
6 - CAPTURING THE 2nd FLAG
- Reading root.txt:
