iMova

This is getting ridiculous. It’s mainly my fault, but some of these exercises in the labs make me want to bang my head on the wall – really hard.

I am trying, and documenting the exercises. I have been working at them for over five months now, and yes, there are a few that have given me some hiccups. The ones that are hitting me hard are using sqlmap to obtain a shell on a target machine, using password attacks that were described in the book, and the Port Redirection/Tunneling. A lot of this is my fault for not going harder at the problems, and faster. For example, I did get the BoFs, but that was seriously like almost a half a year ago.

It looks like I have 12 days left in the labs, and I am definitely not going to get 10 boxes as root and document them all in that amount of time. Oh yeah, I also signed up for the test in September. Oh, and my wife and I are expecting a child in July.

To make matters worse, the prices are going up. So, it’s been real, but I am not sure if I am going to get this cert any time soon. I am not quite sure where to go from here. So let’s analyze, shall we?

Option one:
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

Okay, let’s put the table back….
┳━┳ ヽ(ಠل͜ಠ)ﾉ

Let’s try that again:

1. Just spend every morning for 2 hours in the lab and the exercises. Try to do the areas that you didn’t get (the exercises that you didn’t get) and if you don’t get them, it’s no biggie. Just try to get back into the material, and hit it hard for the last 12 days.
   
2. Post-time: You didn’t get the 5 points. You’ll get them after your first attempt at the exam. Because face it, you aren’t going to pass your first attempt. So here is where HTB and ippsec walkthroughs will help you. Step one, find some free BoFs and PRACTICE them. You know that’s a solid 20 points.
   
3. Walkthrough the boxes in July. Start figuring out your methods. Just try to get as comfortable you can to at least try the exam in September. August, keep on going. Learn as much as you can from tutorials, the book, watch the videos again and relate them to HTBs.
   
4. Fri, 06 Sep 2019, 05:00 (America/New_York), just try.
   
5. Buy 30 days of lab – $300 bones. Finish up the exercises and the boxes. Get the 5 points, then schedule your exam again. Take it.

Remember what your wife said, it’s not how quickly you pass, but when you pass. Don’t give up, don’t get scared. Just go for it. You got this.

Well, I haven’t written for a while, but my daughter turned 4, my wife is expecting in July, and I am waking up pretty early to start studying these days. It’s a slow process, but I’ll get there. My plan is finish the labs, practice on hackthebox.eu and take the test in early September. I feel like failing the first time is simply a right of passage, so if that happens, at least I’ll know what to expect for the next time. I will get this cert. It might take time, but I am going to get it.

I am getting to the end of the labs, and I know now why metasploit is last and why you can only use it on one box – it’s pretty powerful. I did use it to pop my first shell on the lab machines – using 08-067 to exploit SMB!

I didn’t know about meterpreter before the exploit, so I was hanging onto my shell for dear life, trying to upload a privilege escalation executable using certutil and tftp, but the shell was non-interactive and yeah… didn’t get far. But I started reading about meterpreter and all I could think about is how I am going to root that box now with my new knowledge.

The labs ask to perform a few things that I had to skip and gain my knowledge on – i.e., using metasploit to dump hashes and pass the hash. So now, I have to go back and finish up those labs. My lab report, w/o and writeups of pwning the 10 machines is almost at 200 pages. I am not going to fail to get those 5 points. Even if I have to come back and pay for more lab time.

I will have to say that I am really enjoying my time learning through PWK. People slam it for not being current (the exploits and the material), but I think that’s part of it – TRYING HARDER. Also, forget that man, it’s a VERY solid foundation for pen testing.

Now that I have finished tackling LFI attacks, I am moving on to try to do a similar exploit, but rather than executing something from the victim machine, I will execute from my computer (the attacking machine) – hence “Remote File Inclusion” attacks, or RFI attacks.

I seem to be having some trouble with this one, and ultimately going with pausing on this and rethinking. My first thought was to serve php-reverse-shell from pentestmonkey from my machine, but it didn’t work.

I then backed up and thought to myself if the shell was working at all. So I decided to just upload the script on my victim machine and see if I could get a reverse shell. Well, my windows victim machine is super old and http cacheing wasn’t even letting me download the reverse shell to the machine over 80. I tried tftp, and nada. I finally zipped the script, and downloaded the .zip file.

Then I went ahead and unzipped on my victim machine and tried it. It would connect over netcat but then close the connection. So yeah, that’s not working. Honestly, at this point, I don’t even think that I should be downloading outside scripts to get the labs to work. So I am going to back up again, think about having nc.exe served from my machine, and execute a command to that executable. Then at least I can move on with the labs.

I do think there is value to getting the php-reverse-shell from pentestmonkey working though – it would be super valuable when I start popping boxes.