Around the time Def Con was happening this year I was sitting at home feeling left out. That made me feel hacky, but I don’t get the same joy from CTFs at the moment that I used to. So, I decided to start hunting for CVEs. That lead to finding CVE-2024-9162, which was just released today, along with the idea for a larger project that has resulted in a few more vulnerabilities yet to be disclosed.
Armageddon is an Easy level box, and it was about as standard as standard can be. The initial foothold was straight a forward Drupal exploit, and the name of the box is a massive hint (Druppalgeddon2). After gaining the initial foothold, enumerating MySQL and credential stuffing gains us user privileges. All of this is pretty basic. The privilege escalation is achieved through snap, which was interesting to me since I’d never done this before. It was not difficult to identify or exploit though.
Ophiuchi is a Medium box with a weird name to pronounce. The initial foothold was straight forward but fun, the user flag reminds us to go back to the basics, and the root flag is a difficult mind game for those of us that haven’t even been exposed to the technology.
Information Gathering
Port Scan: nmapAutomator
We begin our reconnaissance by running nmapAutomator via sudo ./nmapAutomator.sh 10.10.10.227 All. Among many other things, this runs our port scans with increasing comprehensiveness.
In my previous post I went through the steps I used to install Arch Linux on my Pinebook Pro with a LUKS encrypted root partition. It appears that the repositories used in that post have been retired, and the packages hosted at https://nhp.sh/pinebookpro/ are no longer there. A big thanks to Nadia Holmquist Pedersen for all the work she’s done for Arch on the Pinebook Pro.
The following instructions use Sven Kiljan’s project. You can find his blog post discussing it here, and the GitHub repository here.
My Pinebook Pro came in last week and yesterday I finally got a chance to really play with it. The first thing I wanted to do was get Arch installed on it with an encrypted root partition. I need these notes as a reference to use the next time I do this, so I figured I’d post them up to help anyone else out that may be trying to achieve the same thing. This post ignores post installation configuration. It just gets you booting into the terminal of your LUKS encrypted partition. From there it’s up to you to setup users, install your desktop manager, etc.
Traceback is an easy level box. It’s one of the first boxes on which I’ve been able to get user and root in one sitting. There’s a little bit of OSINT and guess work involved in the initial foothold, and the user/root portions aren’t too difficult at all. The theme of the box is that it has already been compromised by another hacker (Xh4H who authoried the box), and you seem to be retracing their steps while gaining user and root flags.
Traverxec is an easy box worth 20 points, hosted on 10.10.10.165. As we will see the name is indicative of the vulnerability we’ll leverage to gain our initial foothold. Despite having had difficulty with a few steps, when it’s all said and done the box is rather simple. This writeup is a short one because of that.
Information Gathering
As always, we’ll add the IP of the box to our /etc/hosts file. So, from here on out traverxec.htb points to 10.10.10.165.
For some time now, I’ve expected the introduction of new top level domains to confuse the general public. When users are confused, they’re more easily manipulated, making them more likely to fall for age old tricks like phishing attacks.
New gTLDs
It’s been almost 9 years since the announcement below from ICANN came out regarding new top level domains, meaning there would be many more options than the traditional .com, .org, .net, .biz, .gov, .edu, etc.
Today they retired my favorite box so far, Craft. This box was very real world in the chain of mistakes that lead to each exploit. The beer theme and Silicon Valley theme were also awesome. A+ box, and here’s the writeup.
Information Gathering
Port Scan: Nmap
We begin our reconnaissance by running a port scan with Nmap, checking default scripts and testing for vulnerabilities.
root@kali:~# nmap -sVC 10.10.10.110
Starting Nmap 7.70 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2019-08-13 23:23 EDT
Nmap scan report for craft.htb (10.10.10.110)
Host is up (0.40s latency).
Not shown: 998 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open ssh OpenSSH 7.4p1 Debian 10+deb9u5 (protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey:
| 2048 bd:e7:6c:22:81:7a:db:3e:c0:f0:73:1d:f3:af:77:65 (RSA)
| 256 82:b5:f9:d1:95:3b:6d:80:0f:35:91:86:2d:b3:d7:66 (ECDSA)
|_ 256 28:3b:26:18:ec:df:b3:36:85:9c:27:54:8d:8c:e1:33 (ED25519)
443/tcp open ssl/http nginx 1.15.8
|_http-server-header: nginx/1.15.8
|_http-title: 400 The plain HTTP request was sent to HTTPS port
| ssl-cert: Subject: commonName=craft.htb/organizationName=Craft/stateOrProvinceName=NY/countryName=US
| Not valid before: 2019-02-06T02:25:47
|_Not valid after: 2020-06-20T02:25:47
|_ssl-date: TLS randomness does not represent time
| tls-alpn:
|_ http/1.1
| tls-nextprotoneg:
|_ http/1.1
Service Info: OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel
Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at https://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 62.69 seconds
We see from the output above that ports 22 and 443 are open, meaning we’ve got ssh and https to play with. Let’s explore port 443.
This was a semester long project for California State University Sacramento’s Computer System Attacks and Countermeasures (CSC 154). I really enjoyed working on this project, and wanted to archive it on my site, so here it is.
Objective
The objective of this project was to create BadUSB devices, that upon plugin, infect victim computers with malware configured to join a botnet.
Botnet C&C
For our botnet we’re using Build Your Own Botnet. Our ultimate goal was an easily deployed and managed command and control server, with the ability to generate cross platform compatible clients.
