Will's Security Blog

This is meant to be a personal log of study progress toward OSCP certification.

10/03/2017
Lab Progress: 15 days of lab time goes by very quickly!  I have two days left and am feeling pretty good about the amount of practice I’ve got from the labs so far.  There was a fair amount of overlap between them and some of the Vulnhub VMs I’ve done, but as I said in some previous notes I was definitely lacking in experience in Windows machines as well as more “real world” hacking techniques.  Things like pivoting and using captured credentials to log in to other locations within the network aren’t things you’re exposed to in the VMs either.  I’d really like to hone my ability to gain persistence on machines and also get some more experience with Windows priv-esc.  More practice with buffer overflow attacks would definitely help too…

This is meant to be a personal log of study progress toward OSCP certification.

9/26/2017
Lab Progress: New machine again, this one has the following ports/services open:  21/FTP, 22/SSH, 80/HTTP, 110/POP3, 143/IMAP, 3306/MYSQL on FreeBSD.  Was able to get into the mysql admin page (a second URL-brute forced one, the first more predictable one didn’t work) with default creds.  Dumped passwords for several users and cracked their hashes, but stuck on where to use them.  Can’t use on mysql login, SSH, or FTP.  Will see if I can somehow exploit something within the logged in admin page.  Or try to explore more on where the login/pwds could be used.

9/25/2017
Lab Progress: I was able to get shell on the previous machine.  It had a very specific “trick” to solve it which I won’t spoil here.  I am noticing going through the labs that my level of familiarity with windows machines is much less than I would like.  I think this is in large part due to the fact that machines on penteresterlab/vulnhub are almost exclusively linux-based.  I know vulnhub at least hosts tools that help create vulnerable Windows VMs, and there are more to be found…so I will definitely try and focus on remedying this during and after the lab period.

9/24/2017
Lab Progress: Machine 2 – Win2000 server running many services: FTP, ESMTP, IIS, RPC, netbios, RPC, tightvnc.  Navigating to port 80 website I’m presented with a login prompt which is susceptible to SQL injection.  Login bypassed but successful auth just leads to “successful login” screen.  Will need to experiment more to try to use SQLi to acquire useful info.

FTP Service + TightVNC on list to research exploits for.

9/23/2017
Lab Progress: Bad timing to get sick…took a rest day yesterday.  I tried a couple different webshells with the first box along with  using ports like 80, 443, etc. but it didn’t seem to make a difference.  Any changes within WordPress reverted after just a couple minutes, and any webshell session created would get booted off in about the same time frame so I had to be fast.  I prepared 3 separate priv-esc exploits and put them on an webserver hosted in Kali.  Had all my WGET paths ready, webshell code ready, etc.  Rushed through the webshell creation and first exploit as fast as I could and was able to root and get the flag from /root/!  This was a good learning experience for later as I should establish some good methods going forward for gaining permanence on a machine.

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