writeups

IntroductionVintage is a Hard challenge on HackTheBox that simulates an assumed breach scenario in an Active Directory environment where NTLM is completely disabled. The entire exploit relies exclusively on Kerberos, making it an extremely educational challenge for pentesters accustomed to relying on NTLM. With the phase-out of NTLM announced by Microsoft for future versions of Windows Server, this type of environment will become the norm. We might as well prepare for it now. ConfigurationFi...

Sidecar is a chain made up of two machines, WS01 and DC01, classified as difficult. Initial access to WS01 is gained via a booby-trapped .lnk file, set up to limit antivirus detection. Once the first machine has been compromised, the absence of an LDAP signature combined with the presence of WebDAV enables a Shadow Credentials attack to be carried out, resulting in a much deeper compromise of the infrastructure. By compromising WS01, the recovery of a password made it possible to reach an acc...

Vigilant is a chain of Vulnlab-hardened machines, consisting of a Linux machine and a Windows machine. Anonymous access to the domain controller (DC) shares is used to retrieve a PDF file encrypted with ADAudit. By recovering the DLLs linked to the ADAudit executable, we can use ILSpy to identify the way in which the PDF is encrypted, and thus decrypt it. The identifiers contained in the PDF then allow us to access an Elasticsearch administration interface which, once exploited, gives us a sh...

**Kaiju” is a Hard chain made up of three Windows machines, where you have to exploit various advanced techniques to compromise the domain.Initial access is gained through the use of default credentials on an FTP server, retrieving files that give an insight into how administrators construct their passwords.By building a wordlist from this information, it is possible to compromise the backup account, which provides SSH access to the machine.Then, by browsing the FileZilla FTP server logs, we ...

Intercept is a chain of machines consisting of two Windows servers. Initial access is gained via an SCF attack, compromising the account of a domain user. With this access, several notable elements are observed: the domain controller does not enforce LDAP signing, the compromised user has the necessary rights to join a machine to the domain, one of the servers is vulnerable to PetitPotam and has the WebClient service enabled. By combining these vulnerabilities, a Relay (RCBD) attack can be ...

Tengu is a chain of medium level machines, consisting of one Linux machine and two Windows machines. An instance of Node-RED was used to execute code on the Linux machine. The recovery of a database password was then used to compromise a domain account, which was administrator on the Linux machine. The latter had constrained delegation for the MSSQL service, making it possible to compromise the associated MSSQL server. Finally, by recovering information protected by DPAPI, it was possible to ...

Reflection is a chain of 3 Windows machines: MS01 , WS01 and DC01. Initial access is via an SMB connection to MS01, which provides credentials to access an MSSQL database. These are used to retrieve the database’s service account and, using an NTLM Relay attack, to access the DC’s prod share, which contains the credentials of abbie.smith, a domain account. As this account has GenericAll rights on MS01, it can read the LAPS password and retrieve the credentials of the Georgia.Price account on ...

Initial accessWe start by running an nmap scan to identify open ports on the target machine. 123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748Nmap scan report for 10.10.145.204Host is up (0.068s latency).Not shown: 994 filtered tcp ports (no-response)PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION139/tcp open netbios-ssn Microsoft Windows netbios-ssn445/tcp open microsoft-ds?3389/tcp open ms-wbt-server Microsoft Terminal Services|_ssl-date: 2025-06-26T14:08:53+00:00; +1s from...

K2 is a hard room made up of a network containing a Linux machine and 2 Windows with an AD. It allows you to practice basic attacks by confronting certain security equipment that you must try to bypass in order to achieve your goals. EnumerationAs usual, we start by running an nmap scan to identify the machine’s open ports. 12345678910111213141516171819└─$ nmap -A 10.10.18.124 -oA scanStarting Nmap 7.94SVN ( https://nmap.org ) at 2025-06-21 15:50 EDTNmap scan report for k2.thm (10.10.18.124)H...