VHL: Week 2

Week 2’s been a rough week, with a lack of motivation due to personal reasons.

Rooted 1 box on monday and thursday due to spending too much time sleeping. Weekend was the time to make up lost ground and going in harder. But then motivation was lost again.

Got 4 boxes on Saturday, most of the time was fondling with rabbit holes. Learned something the hard way, which could have saved over an hour or so on a box.

Just because it “should” not work, does not mean it will not.

I had suspected a vulnerability which required a full tty shell to exploit. However, the commands which python and which python3 returned some stuff along the lines of no python found or something. That brought me into full research mode for almost an hour trying to find alternative ways to spawn a tty shell.

In the end, I decided to just try it anyway. The usual python -c 'import pty;pty.spawn("/bin/bash")' got me my tty and a huge facepalm. Root came easily after that.

Also learned the hard way that wpscan requires more specific switches to be set to properly enumerate.

I’m somewhat satisfied with the experience VHL is providing right now. But the true verdict will come when I try the PWK labs in the future.