Pentester Academy provided a challenge to do a write-up of their container breakout challenge: “Weakest Link”. Link can be found here: https://attackdefense.pentesteracademy.com/challengedetails?cid=1415. This challenge is an example of a container manager that uses weak credentials that allows the exploiter to gain access to the root/host operating system. The scenario is…

So another vulnhub box called Glasgow Smile was introduced to our team so we learned together. You can download it from: https://www.vulnhub.com/entry/glasgow-smile-11,491/. This VM provides the IP address on boot, so not network discovery required here. We jumped right in to leveraging nmap with nmap -sC -sV -p- $IP -oN…

Lord of the Root is a boot to root style box that offers great opportunities to refine your process and fill in some gaps when your mind-map runs to the end. Here comes the journey. I start with setting the bash variable IP=192.168.152.129 so I don’t have to remember stuff…

So this machine comes up with this. Interesting, we already know 3 usernames: jaye, randy, and tomcat. In order to find this device, this time I used nmap to find the device using: nmap 192.168.56.2/24 -p 22 which just checks for port 22 and sees what we got. I matched…

Another vulnhub box in our learning adventure to apply a systematic approach to penetration testing. I’ll start off with fping -aqg 192.168.4.0/24 and see what all we got. VirtualBox says it gave a MAC address ending in “0C” so let’s do arp -a to see our neighbors. Looks like we…

A vulnhub box that is available for practice that contains quite a few enumeration steps to get code execution on the box. It highlights the importance of enumeration and continuing the process to explore, test, and have a process. This box is VERY finicky and took a few boots in…

The next box that our team has chosen was “HMS” off of vulnhub. This box helped the team realize the necessity of a repeatable process and leverage a tool in new ways to get elevated on the system. It starts off with this: So no IP address show, so we…

So this is the final box in the Harry Potter series on VulnHub. This box definitely elevated the skills from the last two boxes. This box helps teach you the following: Banner Grabbing Buffer Overflow attack Traffic analysis Docker Breakout Exploit modification IP=192.168.4.35 nmap -sC -sV -A $IP -oN Fawkes.nmap …

The second box in the Harry Potter series:”Nagini” is classified as a medium box and ups the ante from the previous box. This box forces us to install some new things and check some new technology along our path to the end. The following techniques were used on this box: …