Hack the Box – Dancing
# Information:
Platform Name: Hack the Box
Machine Challenge: Dancing
Machine Status: Starting Point
Challenge Level: Very Easy
# Used Tools:
- Windows
- nmap
- smb
- terminal
- cat
- get
# Challenge Description:
This challenge has a list of questions that need to be answered in order to retrieve the flag. We will answer every question.
# Writeup:
Task 1:
“What does the 3-letter acronym SMB stand for? “
Answer: The 3-letter acronym SMB stand for Server Message Block. SMB is a client-server protocol that is used to share the access of files, and others, (Sheldon, R, & Scarpati, J., 2021).
Task 2:
“What port does SMB use to operate at?“
Answer: SMB operate at port 445.
Task 3:
“What is the service name for port 445 that came up in our Nmap scan?“
Answer: The service name for port 445 that came up in our Nmap scan is microsoft-ds.
In this task I performed an nmap scan and you can see, in image 1, what ports were open and the services running on them.
Task 4:
“What is the ‘flag’ or ‘switch’ that we can use with the smbclient utility to ‘list’ the available shares on Dancing?“
Answer: To list the available shares on Dancing, we can use the ‘switch’ -L.
I did a bit of research and discovered that the command that I could use to list the available shares was the following:
smbclient -L \\\\<your_IP_here>
You can see this in image 2.
Note: You can see more about switches here. And if you want to know more about the fully command you can visit this page.
Task 5:
“How many shares are there on Dancing?“
Answer: In image 2 you can see that Dancing as 4 shares.
Task 6:
“What is the name of the share we are able to access in the end with a blank password?“
Answer: After trial error, the one that I was able to access in the end with a blank password was WorkShares.
So, I tried to access WorkShares with the following command:
smbclient \\\\<your_IP_here>\\WorkShares
You can see this in image 3.
In image 3 you can see that I used the command ls to list the contents of WorkShares and we had 2 directories names Amy . J and James . P.
To see what was inside of this two directories I used the command cd.
There was nothing interesting inside of Amy directory. So, I changed to James directory. I listed the contents and there it was the flag.
Task 7:
“What is the command we can use within the SMB shell to download the files we find?“
Answer: The command to download files is get. We can use it like so:
get flag.txt
Submit root flag:
I went to the directory to where I downloaded the flag and read it’s content with the following command:
cat flag.txt
The flag is:
Bibliography:
- Sheldon, R, & Scarpati, J., 2021. Server Message Block protocol (SMB protocol). Accessed in September, 2023, on: https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/Server-Message-Block-Protocol
Thank you very much for reading!
Cheers,
SoBatista
