Before completing this machine, I recommend you get familiar with:-

• Basic web application testing
• Privilege escalation
• Nmap and network services

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Nmap

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Starting off with the Nmap scan, we see 3 open ports:-

• 22 - ssh
• 80 - http
• 37370 - running FTP

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Getting the first flag

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When we visit the machine's IP, we see a pretty old looking website which has a bunch of images on it, as well as a pricing page.

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The first thing that came to mind was enumerating the directories.

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Using ffuf, we discover:-

• /gallery
• /static
• /pricing

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It's always a good step to re-enumerate any directories you find, so I ran ffuf on /static again..

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As you can see, we get all the images stored in /static, however, "00" is not present in the /gallery webpage, as the first image is "1".

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Checking /static/00, we find this odd note, that also reveals a hidden directory.

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The hidden webpage is a login portal for the site's developers, after digging around some more, I found hard-coded credentials in an attached JavaScript file.

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Using those credentials, we get redirected to another helpful note on the site.

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"Stop reusing credentials".. hmm.

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Initial access is gained by using the same credentials over an FTP connection.

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From there, we can use "mget" to download all the PCAP files.

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After checking each PCAP file with Wireshark, we stumble upon credentials passed in a POST request.

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Now, using those credentials, we can connect to the machine via SSH, and get the first flag.

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Getting the root flag

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Checking sudo privs yields nothing, but there is an interesting executable file in "/home".

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By setting up a simple HTTP server using Python on the machine, we can use "wget" to download the executable.

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If you've ever done any reverse engineering or cryptography CTFs before, you know that checking files with "strings" can sometimes be useful.

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So, I used "strings" to make a new file, and then checked for any mentions of "user" or "password", and I saw what looks like a hash.

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You can use CrackStation to crack this MD5 hash, which will give us the password for the other user on the machine, "valley".

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After switching to the user "valley", using find we can see which files are owned by the "valleyAdmin" group.

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The base64.py file is owned by "valleyAdmin", and it's used in the cronjob that runs every 1 minute.

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So, all we've got to do is modify the base64.py file to escalate our privileges.

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And just like that, we're root (because we have the effective user-id of root).

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