Reading Time: 3 min read

Start 09:30 25-09-2025

Scope:
10.10.11.166

Recon

Nmap

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

PORT   STATE SERVICE REASON  VERSION
22/tcp open  ssh     syn-ack OpenSSH 7.9p1 Debian 10+deb10u2 (protocol 2.0)
25/tcp open  smtp    syn-ack Postfix smtpd
|_smtp-commands: debian.localdomain, PIPELINING, SIZE 10240000, VRFY, ETRN, STARTTLS, ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES, 8BITMIME, DSN, SMTPUTF8, CHUNKING
53/tcp open  domain  syn-ack ISC BIND 9.11.5-P4-5.1+deb10u7 (Debian Linux)
| dns-nsid:
|_  bind.version: 9.11.5-P4-5.1+deb10u7-Debian
80/tcp open  http    syn-ack nginx 1.14.2
|_http-server-header: nginx/1.14.2
| http-methods:
|_  Supported Methods: GET HEAD
|_http-favicon: Unknown favicon MD5: 556F31ACD686989B1AFCF382C05846AA
|_http-title: Coming Soon - Start Bootstrap Theme
Service Info: Host:  debian.localdomain; OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel

I noticed the 53 port first which I used to zone transfer:

I found a subdomain called preprod-payroll.

80/TCP - HTTP

preprod-payroll

I used gobuster to enumerate the endpoints. Since this is a pre-production subdomain, it’s LIKELY to still contain debug functionalities of some sorts.

/users.php sounds interesting!

I then checked out the other endpoints:

But I couldn’t do anything in either of them. I know that there’s a /database however, meaning some sort of SQL commands get used. Maybe there’s a SQLi here?

SQLi testing

I copied the initial request and used it with sqlmap to bruteforce the db:

It worked!

I found the creds down below:

Administrator
SuperGucciRainbowCake

I could now use these creds to login:

LFI

I tried out reading /etc/passwd using the URL but that didn’t work:

This didn’t seem to work so I tried my next trick to get the PHP page source:

php://filter/read=convert.base64-encode/resource=users

I then used the following to decode the base64 encoding:

The above gave us the file that we should look into, so I went ahead and read and decoded it:

This gave us a set of creds.

remo
TrulyImpossiblePasswordLmao123

However this would not give us access to ssh:

I tried out port 25 but got nowhere either.

ffuf - discovering preprod-marketing

Instead I used ffuf to discover yet another subdomain called preprod-marketing as follows:

preprod-marketing

I head on over to the webpage and am greeted with this landing page.

Here we find yet again a possible LFI vulnerability:

Even More LFI

I was able to retrieve the /etc/passwd file contents as follows:

Here we find the user michael. It is possible that the passwords are reused.

Unfortunately they aren’t. However we can easily grab michael’s id_rsa:

Foothold

SSH as michael

user.txt

Privilege Escalation

fail2ban

Checking sudo -l we notice the following:

In Linux, fail2ban is mostly used to protect the SSH service. If the daemon detects several unsuccessful ssh login attempts, it executes a command that blocks the IP address. So misconfigurations can lead to privilege escalation.

I used the github link and read the instructions: