penetration testing

Hack The Box: Conversor Machine Walkhtrough – Easy Difficulity

Successfully completed the Conversor machine on Hack The Box, focusing on web exploitation and privilege escalation techniques.

For the user flag, initial access was gained by exploiting an insecure XSLT file upload feature. By leveraging EXSLT, I was able to write and execute a malicious script on the server, resulting in a reverse shell as a low-privileged user. Further enumeration uncovered a SQLite database containing hashed credentials, which were cracked to obtain valid SSH access and retrieve the user flag.

For the root flag, privilege escalation was achieved through a misconfigured sudo permission allowing execution of needrestart. This was abused to run a crafted script that modified system binaries, ultimately granting root-level access via a SUID bash shell and completing the machine.

#HackTheBox #CyberSecurity #EthicalHacking #PenetrationTesting #WebSecurity #PrivilegeEscalation #RedTeam #InfoSec #CaptureTheFlag #CTF

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March 21, 2026
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Hack The Box: Gavel Machine Walkthrough – Medium Difficulity

Completed the Gavel (Medium) machine on Hack The Box. The initial foothold came from an exposed .git directory that leaked the application’s source code and bcrypt password hashes. After cracking the credentials with John the Ripper, I gained access and achieved a reverse shell through command injection in the admin rule field. Reusing the cracked credentials allowed privilege escalation to the application user and retrieval of the user flag.

Root access was obtained by abusing the gavel-util submission feature, which executed YAML rule fields using PHP system(). By overwriting the custom php.ini to remove restrictions and creating a SUID Bash binary, it was possible to spawn a root shell and capture the final flag.

#HackTheBox #HTB #CyberSecurity #EthicalHacking #PenetrationTesting #RedTeam #LinuxSecurity #WebSecurity #PrivilegeEscalation #CTF

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March 14, 2026
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Hack The Box: Guardian Machine Walkthrough – Hard Difficulty

🔐 User Flag — Compromising the Application Layer

Successfully rooted the Guardian (Hard) machine on Hack The Box by chaining multiple real-world web vulnerabilities.Initial access was achieved through credential abuse and IDOR within the student portal. Leaked chat credentials exposed internal Gitea repositories containing hardcoded database secrets. A vulnerable XLSX file upload feature allowed formula injection → XSS → session hijacking. Leveraging CSRF, I created a rogue admin account and escalated privileges within the application. From there, an LFI vulnerability combined with a PHP filter chain led to Remote Code Execution. After gaining a shell as www-data, I reused leaked credentials to pivot laterally to user jamil, capturing the user flag.

👑 Root Flag — From Code Injection to Full System Compromise

Privilege escalation started with sudo -l, revealing that jamil could execute a Python utility as user mark without a password. Since one of the Python files was writable, I injected code to spawn a shell as mark. Further enumeration uncovered a custom binary (safeapache2ctl) executable as root. A flawed validation mechanism in its Apache config parsing allowed path traversal and arbitrary file inclusion. By crafting a malicious shared object (evil.so) and abusing the wrapper’s improper include validation, I achieved root-level code execution and obtained a root shell.

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February 28, 2026
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