Finally pwned

Overview

Dante Pro Lab is a great environment that mix both Linux and Windows Operating Systems. It’s permit to practice Enumeration, Exploit Development, Lateral Movement, Privilege Escalation, Web Application Attacks.

Synopsis

Dante LLC have enlisted your services to audit their network. The company has not undergone a comprehensive penetration test in the past, and want to reduce their technical debt. They are concerned that any actual breach could lead to a loss of earnings and reputation damage.

Here’s the list of the machine.

So, there is seven windows machines, and seven linux. The FW DANTE-FW01 on OpenBSD is not in the scope which is pretty clear in the lab’s info. We start with a VPN which give only access to one machine which is the frontend the DANTE-WEB-NIX01 and here begins the journey.

My Experience

A the start, we have to pivot, and this is the best part ! Troubleshhooting network issue is the most satisfying thing in this ctf for me, everything works until you hit the networks, things are hidden and I loved that. The lab was a great playground to practice pivoting with ligolo, to really enumerate machine documents and to break every possible hashes, as one day you could need them while pivoting.

There were two distinct networks, and not all machines could communicate on the same network. Because of this, we had to enumerate every machine to know where to place our agents. To reach certain boxes, we even had to chain two agents together, which is a rare sight in classic TryHackMe or HackTheBox machines.

The lab brings together real-world software used by people every day, like Jenkins and others, so exploiting them allows you to learn through hands-on practice. Personnally I really loved it, and I’m moving on to the next one to see what else I can learn and improve!

Reward

My first beautiful certificate, I wanted to thanks my friend, which guide me trough the buffer overflow exploit, we studied it in class but I know he love the field and is better than me in this. He give me some advices, and when I really tried to exploit the binary, it was a straightforward. I understand what I’ve to find, where and why, really good experience.