Jerry
Initial Enumeration
Our initial enumeration doesn't leave much to the imagination here, our quick nmap scan only returns one open port.
Naturally we assume Tomcat is our target for this box. On tomcat instances, you can reach the management console at /manage, but if you didn't know that already, you can find that using gobuster:
For the login we treat it like any other application, google for default credentials. Doing this brought me to a great github repository for default credentials where I found this page. Using the credentials tomcat:s3cret from that list gives us access.
Execution
Looking at the management console, we see something that catches our eye as a path to execution:
Know that we know we can deploy war files to the server, we can generate a reverse shell with msfvenom:
tunip is a handy bash alias I use to get my current IP address for Hack The Box. it is set to ifconfig tun0 | sed -n '2 p' | awk '{print \$2}' in my ~/.bash_aliases
If you happen to work out of a folder shared between your kali VM and windows like I do, windows defender will nuke this file as soon as you generate it. So it's best to do this somewhere else (I just generated it in /tmp)
After uploading this file we can see it in the list of running applications:
Clicking on the link to our malicious application triggers the reverse shell. It just happens that Tomcat is run as nt authority/system in this case, so we now have full access to the system and are able to read the user and root flags:
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