Hack The Box is a massive, online cyber security training platform, allowing individuals, companies, universities and all kinds of organizations around the world to level up their hacking skills.
Note: Writeups/Walkthroughs on this blog are published only after the particular box is retired from HackTheBox active machines.
Certified is a Windows machine having misconfigured ACL in Active Directory environment where initial access for a low-privileged user judith.mader is provided. Exploitation of the Active Directory Certificate Service (ADCS) is required to get access to the management_svc, ca_operator and Administrator account by abusing shadow credentials and ESC9.
Photobomb is a fun box on Hackthebox where we initially get hardcoded credentials in a Javascript file, which we can use to authenticate with basic auth to access the image resizing tool, which has command injection leading to us getting a reverse shell. After getting initial access as user wizard, we see a cleanup.sh script which can be run as root. We then abuse the redirection operator > clobbering the /etc/passwd file to escalate our privileges by adding user wizard to group root.
Legacy is a relatively easy box which has SMB running on Windows XP(2000) OS. We find the exploit with metasploit and get access to priviledged user NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM directly.