Okay, so, yesterday I finally dove into something I’ve been meaning to try for ages: the “president’s men” setup. You know, that whole “find the hidden info, follow the breadcrumbs” kind of thing. I’d read a few articles about it, seemed cool, so I thought, “What the heck, let’s give it a shot.”
First, I started by just setting up the basic environment. I mean, nothing fancy, just a virtual machine with a clean install of Kali Linux. Figured I’d need a safe space to mess around without accidentally bricking my actual system. Downloaded the ISO, spun up the VM in VirtualBox, and got that all squared away. Took maybe an hour, fighting with VirtualBox settings as usual.
Then, I got to the real meat of it. I followed some writeups online. It was super important to follow the instructions. I started by trying to enumerate the target. Standard stuff, you know: Nmap, the basics. I launched Nmap. Then, some service enumeration, nothing too crazy. I just wanted to see what was open, what versions were running, the usual suspects.
Next, I tried some basic password attacks. There were a few services running that looked vulnerable. I pulled out my trusty password list. I know it’s not the most sophisticated approach, but sometimes the low-hanging fruit is the juiciest, right? Anyway, tried a few common passwords, saw if anything stuck. No dice.
After that failed, I decided to dig a little deeper. I mean, the initial scan didn’t reveal anything groundbreaking, so I figured there had to be something hidden. Started looking for hidden directories, you know, using tools like GoBuster. I fired up GoBuster. I did that against the web server and let it churn for a while.
Then, bam! GoBuster actually found something interesting. It spat out a directory that wasn’t immediately obvious. I immediately opened that in my browser, and it asked for a password. I tried default credentials, a few common guesses, but nothing worked.
So, I started thinking outside the box. I went back to the initial scan, the service enumeration, and looked for anything that might give me a clue. Then, I noticed something in the version number of one of the services that I had missed. I googled that version number along with the name of the service, and wouldn’t you know it, there was a known exploit.
I downloaded the exploit, tweaked it a little to match the specific setup I was seeing on the target, and ran it. And… it worked! I got a shell! Not a great shell, but a shell nonetheless. It was enough for me to get a foothold.
Now that I had a shell, I started looking around. Browsed the file system. I saw some interesting files in a user’s home directory. There were some scripts, some configuration files. Nothing jumped out as immediately useful, but it was a starting point.
Finally, the big payoff! After poking around for a while, I found a file with credentials for a different user, a user with more privileges. I switched users. And then, from there, it was pretty straightforward to escalate to root.
It was a fun exercise, really. It took the better part of the day, but it was worth it. Reminded me that the basics are still super important, and that sometimes all it takes is a little persistence and a willingness to dig deeper to find what you’re looking for.
