Pen-testing on Earth CTF

Hey there, let’s get excited and dive into the Earth CTF! It’s going to be a thrilling cybersecurity challenge! As usual, we’ll start by doing some Reconnaissance, which is like gathering intel before embarking on an adventure.Reconnaissance helps us understand the lay of the land, discover potential weak points, and plan our approach. It’s like being a cyber-spy, searching for hidden information and vulnerabilities.You know what they say, ‘If you give me ten hours to chop down a tree, I’ll spend nine and a half hours sharpening my axe.’

Reconnaissance

Using Nmap, we’ve identified some open ports on the target system. We’ve got port 22, which is commonly used for Secure Shell (SSH) communication, allowing us to securely access and manage the system remotely. Port 80 is also open, which means we can send and receive unencrypted web pages. Additionally, port 443 is open, which is used for sending and receiving encrypted web pages. Afterward, we will fuzz through and potentially brute force files and directories on a web server.

Looking at the robots.txt file gives us “testingnotes,” which is of interest to us.

Testingnotes further gives us information, specifically regarding a secure messaging system. There is a message sent by an admin named Terra and testdata file

Decoding the message in testdata reveals the password: “earthclimatechangebad4humans.” Therefore, we can log in using the obtained username and password to view a CLI. Once logged in, we can explore ways to obtain a reverse shell.

EXPLOITING

Well we obtained a reverse shell.

Now, looking for the flag