HtB Walkthroughs

CPTS Prep - Authority - Windows Medium

HTB Authority: From Anonymous SMB Share to Domain Admin Authority is a Windows Active Directory box that chains together an open SMB share, leaked Ansible Vault secrets, a password manager web app, an LLMNR/LDAP credential capture, and finally Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) abuse to go from zero credentials

CPTS Prep - Union - Linux Medium

Union is a medium-difficulty Linux box on HackTheBox that revolves around a single web application with a homemade SQL injection filter. The path to root goes from bypassing that filter, to reading source code and config files off disk, to abusing a sudo rule tied to an iptables command.

HtB Walkthroughs

CPTS Prep - TombWatcher - Windows Medium

TombWatcher is a medium difficulty Active Directory box on HackThebox that starts as an assume breach scenario. You're handed a single set of low privilege credentials and have to chain together six different identities before reaching Administrator. Along the way there's targeted Kerberoasting, gMSA password abuse,

HtB Walkthroughs

CPTS Prep - MetaTwo - Linux Easy

Difficulty: Easy OS: Linux Topics: WordPress, SQL Injection, XXE, FTP, Passpie, GPG Overview MetaTwo is an Easy-rated Linux box that chains together three CVEs to get from zero to root. The foothold comes from an unauthenticated SQL injection in a WordPress plugin that leaks password hashes, which are then

HtB Walkthroughs

CPTS Prep - VulnCicada - Windows Medium

VulnCicada is a Windows Active Directory machine that initially looks fairly uninteresting. The web server is just a default IIS installation and anonymous SMB access does not provide anything useful. The interesting part is the NFS share running on port 2049. It exposes user profile directories, including two images. One

HtB Walkthroughs

CPTS Prep - StreamIO - Windows Medium

StreamIO is a Windows Active Directory box that chains together a classic web application SQL injection, some password cracking, and an ACL abuse trick to go from an anonymous unauthenticated user all the way to Domain Admin. Below is a full walkthrough of how I got through it. Initial Recon

HtB Walkthroughs

CPTS Prep - Administrator - Windows Medium

HTB Administrator: A Chain of Small Privileges There's a particular kind of Windows engagement that doesn't hinge on a single flashy exploit. Instead, it's built from a sequence of small privileges: a GenericAll here, a password reset there, a forgotten credential store, each one

HtB Walkthroughs

CPTS Prep - Active - Windows Easy

Active is a retired Windows Active Directory box on Hack The Box, and it is a great introduction to two of the most common real world AD attacks: GPP password extraction and Kerberoasting. Here is how I worked through it from initial scan to root. Initial Enumeration I started with

HtB Walkthroughs

CPTS Prep - Media - Medium Windows

Enumeration I started with a standard Nmap scan to see what was exposed. r3v@copium ~> sudo nmap -sC -sV 10.129.234.67 Starting Nmap 7.94SVN ( https://nmap.org ) at 2026-08-30 15:34 CEST Nmap scan report for 10.129.234.67 Host is up (0.

HtB Walkthroughs

CPTS Prep - Postman - Linux Easy

HackTheBox - Postman Writeup Difficulty: Easy OS: Linux Tags: Redis, SSH Key Injection, John the Ripper, Webmin, CVE-2019-12840 Summary Postman is a Linux machine with an unauthenticated Redis instance exposed on a non-default port. Writing a public SSH key directly into Redis and saving it as authorized_keys

HtB Walkthroughs

CPTS Prep - Pov - Windows Medium

HackTheBox - Pov Writeup OS: Windows Tags: ASP.NET, IIS, Path Traversal, ViewState Deserialization, DPAPI, SeDebugPrivilege Summary Pov is a Windows machine centred around a developer's portfolio site running on IIS with ASP.NET WebForms. The attack chain involves discovering an arbitrary file read vulnerability in a CV download

HtB Walkthroughs

CPTS Prep - Jeeves - Windows Medium

HTB Jeeves: a walkthrough of one of the most troll-y boxes I've done Jeeves is a Windows box on HTB, and I'm just going to say it up front: whoever built this box is an absolute menace. In the best way. Every time I thought

HtB Walkthroughs

CPTS Prep - Fluffy - Easy Windows

Hack The Box: Fluffy Introduction Fluffy is an Active Directory box that ended up being a really nice chain of different AD attacks. The path involved Kerberos, SMB enumeration, CVE-2025-24071, NetNTLMv2 capture and cracking, BloodHound/RustHound enumeration, abusing GenericWrite, shadow credentials, WinRM, and finally AD CS to become

HtB Walkthroughs

CPTS Prep - Trick - Easy Linux

HTB Trick: How a DNS Zone Transfer Unraveled an Entire Payroll System A walkthrough of HackTheBox's "Trick" machine, or, how I learned to stop trusting a blank front page and start enumerating harder. First Impressions Every box starts the same way: point Nmap at it and

HtB Walkthroughs

Paperwork - Easy Linux

Hack The Box Paperwork: From Printer Command Injection to Root Introduction Paperwork is a Linux machine centered around a custom printer/archive application. The initial foothold comes from source code exposed through the web application, which reveals a custom Python printer daemon listening on TCP/1515. From there, the attack

HtB Walkthroughs

Silentium - Easy Linux

Hack the Box Silentium writeup Summary Silentium is a Linux box themed around a fake institutional finance firm. The attack chain involves vhost enumeration to discover a Flowise AI instance, chaining two critical CVEs to gain authenticated RCE, pivoting from a Docker container to the host via exposed environment variables,

Projects

Master's Thesis: Measuring Security Drift in Iteratively Vibe-coded Web Applications

Today you can build a working web app just by chatting with an AI. You describe what you want, you paste the code, you run it, and you do it again. The barrier to enter has become very low. Many people who use this have no background in software, and

HtB Walkthroughs

Conversor - Easy Linux

HackTheBox Conversor Walkthrough OVERVIEW Conversor is a Linux machine running an Apache web server hosting a file conversion web application. The attack chain involves uploading a malicious Python reverse shell via an XSLT injection vulnerability, cracking credentials found in a local SQLite database, and escalating privileges via a known needrestart

Projects

Bachelor Project: Game-based learning in cyber security

Cyber Security · Game-Based Learning · Java · Bachelor Project May 2024 The Problem Here's a stat that stuck with me: 68% of data breaches involve a non-malicious human element. Not sophisticated zero-day exploits or nation-state hackers breaking through firewalls just regular people clicking the wrong link,

Misc

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

It's genuinely wild when you stop and think about it. Some of the most commonly used exploits in pen-testing and CTF platforms like Hack The Box, things like EternalBlue which underpins the legendary MS17-010 vulnerability, didn't come from security researchers or tool developers. They

Misc

Penelope Shell Handler

What Is It? If you've spent any time on Hack The Box, you know the pain. You pop a shell, celebrate for about three seconds, and then the real suffering begins coping with a dumb, non-interactive reverse shell that can't tab-complete, and dies if

Projects

Android Malware Detection Using Static and Dynamic Techniques

This school project focused on detecting Android malware by analyzing how apps are built and how they behave at runtime. Instead of relying on very large feature sets, the goal was to investigate whether a smaller and more meaningful set of features could still provide reliable and interpretable malware detection

Projects

Detecting Runtime Attacks

This project, titled "Runtime Software Attacks," was a my second semester cybersecurity project focused on implementing and detecting runtime control flow attacks, specifically buffer overflow exploits and Return-Oriented Programming (ROP). These attacks are particularly dangerous because they hijack a program's execution using code that'

Projects

SECURE BLOCKCHAINS FOR THE SHIPPING INDUSTRY

During my first semester studying my masters degree in cybersecurity at Aalborg University, our team dove into one of the trickiest challenges in global shipping: how to make data more transparent, reliable, and secure. Our project, "Developing a Secure Blockchain System," explored how blockchain technology could tackle inefficiencies,

HtB Walkthroughs

Imagery: HackTheBox Medium Box Writeup

Overview Imagery is a Medium-rated Linux machine on HackTheBox that chains together several classic web vulnerabilities in a cool sequence: session token analysis, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) for session hijacking, and Local File Inclusion (LFI) to pull sensitive files from the server. It's a great box for