March 2019 - thefluffy007

boot2root, hacking, web application security

@TryHackMe – Pickle Rick CTF

March 14, 2019March 3, 2021 thefluffy007

Another day, another challenge.

Today’s blog post I will be solving the Pickle Rick CTF on TryHackMe.com. Click HERE to be redirected to the challenge.

After hitting the deploy button we now have our IP address.

We see that this challenge is focused on finding vulnerabilities in a web server.

Let’s run nmap, nikto, and dirbuster to see what we find…

Executing nmap, we see that there are two port open – 22 (ssh), and 80 (http).

Moving on to nikto…

Running nikto we see that there is an login php file which is interested.

Finally, let’s look at dirbuster.

With dirbuster we have an access directory, as well as an index.html, and robots.txt file (both returning a 200 which is good). We also have a server-status which is returning a forbidden http code of 403.

We’ve done basic enumeration let’s move to the web app and see if we can find more clues.

Let’s answer the first question.

Navigating to the IP address in a browser we see the following.

Nothing really stands out, except for the burping :-). Let’s view the source code and see what we find.

Viewing the source code (Right click on page, select view source code) we see at the bottom there’s a username. Let’s see if we can find a password. Maybe our dirbuster results will come in handy…

Going back to our results in dirb we notice there’s a robots.txt file. Going to this file, we see the above. Hmm, this is a strange robots.txt file. Maybe this could be the password, let’s see if it works.

In our nikto results, we had a login page. Navigating to that page and entering our username from the index.html page, and a password from the robots.txt page we get the following.

Success! We’re in the application.

Let’s run the ls (listing) command with the options of all and long listing and see what we have.

Opening the Sup3rS3cretPickl3Ingred.txt file we have the first ingredient below.

Also notice that the directory shows the asset directory that we found in dirbuster. Navigating to that webpage we see the following

The directory have gifs and jpgs, nothing of importance to solve the challenge.

Let’s move on to question 2.

We know this application is vulnerable to command injection, let’s see if we can perform a directory traversal to view other parts of the application. Going back to the directory listing we notice there’s a clue.txt file. Opening the file we see the following

Our hunch was correct, we need to look around the file system to find the next ingredient.

In the above command we’re doing a directory traversal to move up to the root directory, list all of the files in long form (ls -al), and print the working directory to make sure we’re in the correct folder (pwd). Doing this we get the below screenshot.

We’re viewing the root level directory, so our command(s) were a success! We notice a lot of folders, but at this time two are useful for us. The first is home, which in every Linux system ever user has a home directory. The second is root (admin/super user) which can only be accessed through the admin. We’ll come back to root later. Let’s see if we can navigate to the home directory.

Executing the command above, we’re now in the /home directory! We notice there are two folders, rick and Ubuntu. The Ubuntu folder is from the operating system. Let’s explore the rick folder and see what we can find.

Changing to the rick directory we see the second ingredient!

Using the less command we open the second ingredient. Note: The filename is in quotations due to spacing. Without the quotations Linux would interpret the second in second ingredients.

We now have our second ingredient, let’s answer the final question.

Remember in the beginning of this walkthrough, I mentioned that another folder – root is of particular interest to us and only the admin or superuser is the only user to access this folder. Let’s see if we can elevate our privileges to the admin and view this folder.

Before we can access this folder, let’s run the sudo -l command to see what privileges we have on this box.

Executing this command we see that we can execute ANY command on this box WITHOUT a password (ALL NOPASSWD: ALL). This surely is NOT good security! Let’s use the sudo command with the listing (ls) with the root folder and see what we can find.

Executing the command, we see that there are two files in the /root folder. One of them is named 3rd.txt. Could this be our third ingredient? Let’s see.

Executing the sudo command in conjunction with the less command on the 3rd.txt file, we see that we do indeed have the third and final ingredient.

Challenge solved!

boot2root, hacking, web application security

@TryHackMe – Basic Pentesting Room

March 11, 2019March 3, 2021 thefluffy007

Another day, another challenge.

Today’s blog post – I will give a walk-through on a boot-to-root room called, “Basic Pentesting Room”. This boot to root is perfect to get practice in preparation for the OSCP.

Let’s get started.

Logging into TryHackMe with your credentials and heading into the room we see the following:

OK, we have tasks to complete and we will learn the following skills – brute forcing, hash cracking, service enumeration, and Linux enumeration.

The first question is:

Clicking the deploy button at the top we get the following:

Second question is:

OK, we need to find the services exposed. What can we do?

One solution is to use nmap -sV (TCP scan) <IP address>

In this case it would be nmap -sV 10.0.0.204. Doing this we see the following screenshot:

Success! We now have the services.

Let’s use dirb to find the hidden directories. See the following screenshot:

Our hidden directory is development.

Reviewing our enumeration we see that ports 139 and 445 are open. These ports are used for SMB (Server Message Blocks) which are HIGHLY vulnerable. Let’s run the command enum4linux and see what we find.

We found two users: kay and jan

Question #5!

First, entering kay, I received an error. Let’s try entering jan. Success!

Let’s fire up Hydra which is password cracking tool with the password list of rockyou (this password list is used a lot in Kali and even in the OSCP… hint, hint!)

The service we use to access the server is SSH.

kay

Since we have a new user (kay) and we have a ssh folder that lists the public key we can try to get the password.

From question #10 we have the user (kay) and a public key how can we go about cracking the key?

Doing a quick Google search, I was presented with the following link.

Scrolling down we see the following:

Let’s see if we can recreate this to find the passphrase. Using the ssh2john we created the hash.

Next we’ll use John The Ripper with the famous rockyou wordlist to see if we can crack the passphrase.We were successful! The passphrase is beeswax. Let’s try to ssh with kay’s private key and see if we can get in.

Entering the passphrase we see that we were able to successfully log into the kay account! Just to be sure I issued the command of whoami (don’t mind the fat fingering!)

Next, we run the list command to see what we’re working with. We see a pass.bak file, let’s see if this lists the password. Opening the file we see the password. Score!

Let’s run sudo -l, which will show us what commands kay can run as root. We’re prompted with the password and we entered the password that we just acquired. We’re presented with all of the commands that kay can run, and we see that kay can execute all commands as root. Great, this will be helpful for us.

There’s another file that is important in the directory – bash_history. Bash_history is useful because it shows all the commands the user executed before logging off. Let’s open the file.

After opening the file we see a lot of commands. There is one that is very useful – sudo su. If working correctly, running this command we will change from the kay user to root. In other words we would do privilege escalation – where we start as a non-admin user and through improper configuration change to a root user. Let’s try the command and see if it works.

Running the sudo su command, and typing whoami, we see that we’re now root! We do another directory listing which shows the files from before, so no change. Let’s see if we can get into the root directory.

Changing to the root directory we see that there is a flag.txt file. Opening this file we presented with the verbiage above. We solved the challenge!

boot2root, hacking, OSCP, web application security

OSCP Series: Kioptrix Level 3

March 10, 2019March 3, 2021 thefluffy007

Another day, another challenge.

In today’s blog post we’re going to solve level 3 of the Kioptrix series.

For the level 2 walk through, click HERE.

Let’s begin.

Starting the VM, we’re presented with the following login screen.

Going back to the login screen the disclaimer states that we need to modify the /etc/hosts to include our IP address that our kioptrix3 vm is running.

Let’s see which services are running on the virtual machine

Hmm… we have two services open – ssh and http. Let’s go to the web application and do a manual crawl of the site.

Navigating to kioptrix3.com we see the following:

Clicking the Login button we’re presented with a login screen. At the bottom we notice the page is using LotusCMS. Let’s keep this in mind, just in case we it to exploit the application.

Let’s run nikto to see if we can find more vulnerabilities in the web application.

We see that the application found a phpmyadmin folder. Let’s go to the folder and see what we can find.

Going to the php page, we realize we don’t have login credentials, so at this point we can’t log into the phpmyadmin page. We know the application is using LotusCMS let’s see if there’s a LotusCMS module that we can use in Metasploit.

After opening and searching Metasploit for LotusCMS we see there’s a perfect remote code execution we can use.

After selecting the exploit let’s review the options to see what we need to add to the module to make the exploit work. We need a remote host (RHOST), remote port (RPORT) and the URI. Let’s add the information below.

After entering the information, and typing run, we notice that we’re presented with a meterpreter shell! Let’s go to the home directory and see how many users are on the box.

We have three users, dreg, loneferret, and www (web). Let’s see what’s in the dreg folder.

Searching the dreg folder we don’t see much. We see a bash_logout, bashrc, and profile scripts. Let’s move on to loneferret.

Hmm… Loneferret has a lot of information. We see there’s a file titled, “.sudo_as_admin_successful”, a company police readme, and a checksec script. Let’s review the company policy readme.

Well… it seem if we want to edit, create, or view files we need to use the command sudo ht. Let’s keep this in our toolbox because I am sure we will use it later. Remember we found a phpmyadmin page, let’s see if we can find a config file with login credentials.

Doing a search on the kioptrix3 folder, we see there are three config files. Let’s review the last file, gconfig.php.

Opening the gconfig.php file we notice there are login credentials for the phpmyadmin page! Let’s keep this in our toolbox because we might have to use it later.

At this point, we have php login credentials, but that’s not enough to gain root privileges. Let’s see if we can review the web application again for more clues.

We notice there’s a gallery section of the application. Maybe we can be lucky and the application is susceptible to sql injection.

Adding an apostrophe to the end of the number there’s no change in the application. We notice at the bottom of the page there’s a sorting option. Let’s see if changing the sorting option will invoke a SQL injection.

Changing the sorting option to Photo Id, and adding the apostrophe to the end of the number, we get the following…

Success! The application is susceptible to SQL injection. Let’s fire up sqlmap and see what goodies we can find.

Executing a preliminary SQLMap run we see that SQLMap verified our manual testing results that the application is susceptible to SQL injection. SQLMap also found the technologies the application is using. Let’s do a more extensive probe. Firing SQLMap again we use the dump all to see what data we can find.

We found the dev accounts database, and notice that we have two users dreg, and loneferret, along with their passwords. Remember these are the same users we found when we used Metasploit with the LotusCMS remote code execution.

Now that we have login credentials, and we know that loneferret has more promising information than dreg, let’s connect to loneferret’s account through ssh.

Connecting to loneferret’s account, we try to access the root folder, but receive a permission denied (we’re not root… yet). We also try to execute the sudo ht command that was listed in the company readme file, and we get the error, “error opening terminal: xterm-256color”.

Doing a quick google search we find that we need to use the following command “export TERM=xterm”. Doing this and running the sudo ht command again we’re presented with the following screenshot. Let’s see if we can view and modify the /etc/sudoers file and see if we can escalate our privileges from loneferret to root.

Opening the /etc/sudoers file we notice that the loneferret has a user privilege escalation where a password is not required. Right now it’s for the commands: su, and sh. Let’s add our ht command to the list. After adding the command, saving, and exiting we’re presented back to the command prompt.

Executing the command sudo /bin/sh, and running a whoami we see that we’ve been escalated to root! Running the ls command we see that we’re presented with the same information we had in our meterpreter shell. Changing our directory to /root we notice there’s a Congrats.txt file.

Opening the Congrats.txt file we have found the flag and completed the challenge!