Challenge Overview

You are hired by a company as a penetration tester. The system administrator has opened some services which are needed to keep the company in a productive state. The company wants to make sure that the services that are running are secured in a manner that no unauthorized individual can access their system. As a penetration tester, your job is to find flaws in services and get full access to the system. Your target machine is running Ubuntu and has an IP address of 10.10.1.4. Find the encrypted text on a hidden directory and escalate the privilege by exploiting a vulnerable service.

What You Will Learn

  • Understanding and applying classical cryptography techniques, specifically decrypting a Vigenère cipher to recover meaningful credentials.
  • Conducting proper enumeration of hidden directories and exposed web content to locate encrypted data used for initial access.
  • Gaining and managing initial foothold via SSH, demonstrating post-exploitation awareness after credential recovery.
  • Analyzing and abusing sudo misconfigurations, particularly understanding the security implications of being allowed to run the reboot command with elevated privileges.
  • Exploiting systemd service misconfigurations, specifically modifying a user-writable service file to execute a malicious payload (e.g., reverse shell) during system reboot to achieve root access.

Program Curriculum

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