Hacking

Initial Entry Point During a routine exploration of vulnerable servers on the internet, I successfully gained root access to several machines. While the specific method used to achieve root access is beyond the scope of this blog, I’ll focus on how I expanded my access to other servers within the same organization. Extracting Linux User Hashes Once inside the compromised machine, I noticed multiple user accounts. With root privileges, I accessed the /etc/shadow file, which stores password hashes for all users on the system. I copied the contents of the shadow file to my local machine and extracted the hashes using the following command: ...

Discovery of Vulnerable Machines While investigating vulnerable, internet-facing systems, I successfully compromised several devices. Although the specific techniques I used to gain initial access fall outside the scope of this post, the real discovery came during my post-exploitation phase on one of the compromised machines. Discovering Vulnerable SSH Configurations While reviewing the files on the compromised system, I stumbled upon something interesting in the ~/.ssh directory of a particular user account. Within this directory, I found a private key file being used for SSH logins to other systems. My next step was to check whether the private key was encrypted. ...

Understanding Lateral Movement Lateral movement in cybersecurity refers to the techniques used by attackers to move within a compromised network after gaining initial access. This allows them to escalate privileges, exfiltrate data, and reach high-value targets while evading detection. Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) commonly use this tactic to maintain long-term access, often remaining undetected for extended periods. Entry Point During my exploration of vulnerable and misconfigured internet-facing machines, I was able to gain root access to several devices. The methods I used to gain initial access are beyond the scope of this blog. While analyzing one of the compromised machines during post-exploitation, I noticed in the bash history that the user frequently connected to other devices via SSH. This discovery led me to investigate further, with the goal of capturing credentials to access additional systems. ...

Prologue While exploring devices on my college network, I managed to gain Remote Desktop Access to a server for one of our institute’s websites. The method I used to obtain access to the interface is out of the scope of this blog. Upon gaining access, I found that the server was running Ubuntu. The terminal displayed user as the current user. I added my public key to /home/user/.ssh/authorized_keys and checked the SSH connection. With SSH access confirmed, it was time to escalate our privileges to the root user. ...

Portainer Portainer is an open-source management tool designed for containers. It offers a user-friendly, lightweight web interface that simplifies the deployment and management of Docker environments. It’s important to note that while Portainer itself does not run with root privileges, if the Docker service managed by Portainer operates with root permissions, it could potentially lead to a remote root shell vulnerability, as discussed further. Information Gathering Collecting Target Devices We’ll use Shodan Search Engine to Collect Target Devices. On Shodan Search Engine search with query product:portainer, this would list out all the Devices that were identified running Portainer by Shodan. After setting the requeired filters, we can download the results. The Number of Results that can be downloaded depends upon your query credits available(1 Query Credit = 100 Results) After Shodan has done compiling the data, it sends us a Mail that Data is ready for Download or we can alernatively wait on Shodan Download Page while the data is being compiled The Download will be in the format .json.gz. Shodan provides a Command-Line Utility to Parse the data in these download files. The utility can be installed with the command ...