Pathfinder Walkthrough

After the Shield Walkthrough, Here I'm with Pathfinder box and this is the last box you can play if you are a free member on HTB platform. Let's hack and grab the flags.

As I mentioned before, the starting point machines are a series of 9 easily rated machines that should be rooted in sequence. So it means, if you need to go through this box, first of all you must have a complete Shield machine.

Enough talks, 🥱 Let’s Get It Started 🐱‍💻

Disclaimers: No flags (user/root) are shown in this writeup (as usual in writeups), so follow the procedure to grab the flags! 🐱‍👤

00. Start Machine …

To start machine, just click "Join Machine".

Pathfinder

Then you can see the IP address for that machine. Usually it is 10.10.10.30 🤠

10.10.10.30

Before going enumeration steps we can simply ping to the IP address and check our VPN connection and whether the machine is alive. Sometimes the machines might "Disable" ping requests from passing through the firewall. But in most cases ping will be a success! 🙂

As a ping result, It's TTL=127. There is only one route between machine and us (VPN). So definitely it will be a Windows machine.

01. Enumeration First …

01.1 Fast ports scan

As usual, run Nmap fast scan for all TCP ports to identify the ports which are open.

Here is the output 👇

This is why I recommend to scan all the ports. Here you can see there are so many ports open and by looking at the open ports (ldap,kpasswd5 & kerberos) we can definitely say that this machine is an Active Directory machine. We haven't touched that area before. Sharp your Active Directory enumeration skills, it will worth if you are willing to try Red Team activities.

Active Directory is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. It is included in most Windows Server operating systems as a set of processes and services. Initially, Active Directory was only in charge of centralized domain management. [Copied from Wikipedia]

01.2 Run Nmap Scripting Engine

To get the best result, we can run the Nmap Scripting Engine for all open ports. Now we know all of the open ports and therefore we can point out and run the script engine as fast as possible.

As it is an Active Directory machine, our enumeration steps will be different. ldap enumeration is pretty cool if you use BloodHound because it gives us graphical information. But it's already done in official writeup. So let's begin with my way. 😎😎

01.3 Discover more on domain

Nmap tells us the domain (Domain: MEGACORP) we are in. And don't forget we had some credentials from Shield machine. sandra:Password1234! First we can tryout with ldapdomaindump tool. Let's start.

Here is the output, 👇👇

As you can see there are a lot of HTML files here. Among them, first I choose domain_users.html You can view through it from the browser. But instead of that, I will use html2text tool. You can simply install it by typing sudo apt-get install html2text . However the result will be like this. 👇👇

There are 5 accounts here. Guest, Administrator and krbtgt accounts are the default accounts. sandra and svc_bes accounts are user created ones. As you can see, I highlighted the svc_bes account because it has enabled theDONT_REQ_PREAUTH flag.

Now I'll simply explain what the kerberos authentication is. If you need to know what DONT_REQ_PREAUTH flag means, you must understand the kerberos authentication before.

This draft shows you how the normal authentication process. But if DONT_REQ_PREAUTH flag is set, second and third steps of the process can be missed. That means you can directly request the service ticket. Click here if you need more information about kerberos authentication.

02. Foothold

Now we are going to use impacket's GetNPUsers.py script to grab the request service ticket.

If you don't have that script installed on your computer follow below command to install it.

Type below commands to grab the request ticket.

Output will be like this. 👇👇

We grabbed the ticket. Now it's time to powerup John the Ripper and crack the hash. First of all copy that hash to file then run the john.🤠🤠

We got the password for svc_bes !!!

  • svc_bes : Sheffield19

Now since we have the username and password, we can use Evil-WinRM tool. You can simply install it by typing gem install evil-winrm and hit enter, then the tool will be installed to your machine. 😎😎

Now, don't you have a question ❓ We already have the username and password for user sandra. Why didn't we use it? It's because there is nothing inside that account. It's just a simple user account.

Let's run the tool for svc_bes account.

user.txt

So we got the user flag. Now, time to escalate privileges.

03. Privilege Escalation

Now we are going to perform DCSync attack and dump the NTLM hashes of all domain users using the Impacket's secretsdump.py script. 😈😈 Let's try it.

Here is the output. 👇👇

As you can see, We have NTLM hash for the Administrator account. We can use this to perform Pass The Hash attack and gain elevated access to the system. Also we can use Impacket's psexec.py for this too.

See how impacket helps us during this machine. Give respect to the SecureAuth Corporation. 🙋‍♂️🙋‍♂️

03.1 Perform Pass The Hash Attack

First, copy the above Administrator's hash without triple colon (:::) at the end and then type this.

root.txt

We got the root flag too!!. 🧐🧐

root.txt

04. Post Exploitation

Since these boxes are all connected, we are going to grab the local admin hash too. So let’s upload mimikatz. You can download mimikatz tool from here and upload it to the box using python demon web server.

Then we can run that file by typing .\mcat And then run the lsadump::sam command.

Here is the hash : 7facdc498ed1680c4fd1448319a8c04f

You can decode it through the crackstation site.

The password is : Password!

Finally we are done. and from here you must have VIP or VIP+ membership to play with other boxes.

Okay... I’ll see you on the next box! 🙋‍♂️🙋‍♂️

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