Hack the Box – Meow

In this first post, we will start with the first machine in Hack the Box – Tier 0 called „Meow„.
These Tier 0 machines are a perfect possibility to start to learn IT-Security, Pen-Testing etc. etc.
I will write for every machine one post.
So, let’s start with the first machine and have fun…

Instructions for start the VPN and the machine

At first click on the Meow machine and choose Download your files and connect from your own environment.
After that, choose your VPN access, VPN server and afterward click on the “Download VPN button”.
Save the file wherever you want.

Open a terminal in you Kali-Linux system and navigate to the folder where the downloaded VPN file is.
With the command sudo openvpn “VPN-filename” can you start the VPN connection to the Hack the Box server.

How to hack the Meow machine

After the VPN Login, you can start the Meow machine.

Copy the IP address and make a ping on it.

The next step is, you need to do an nmap-scan on the victim system. You can use the command for this.“nmap -sC -sV -oN nmap/initial IP-ADDRESS”

• The “-sC” switch is for more intensive check for which services and versions are running on the open ports.
• The “-sC” switch is for using some default scripts while the scan is running
  The “–script=default” would the same command
• With the “-oN” switch, you can save the nmap scan results in a file.
  “nmap/initial” is the path to the file and the file name.
• The last one, is the victim system IP address.

Is the nmap scan successful, you can open the file and analyze it.

We can see, there is one port open. This port is the port 23/tcp. And on this port runs a service called “telnet”.
Then let´s test the default connection over telnet.

Use the command “telnet IP-ADDRESS”, to try to establish a connection.            
At the first time to try to use connection, always try the default login credentials. We can see, the login
with the default credentials is working.

Now we can search for the flag.txt.
In this case, is it easy. Let´s use the “ls” command for check the folders. And now we can see the flag.txt. Use the “cat flag.txt” command for putting out the file content.

Answers for the Meow-VM questions

1. Task 1
   • [Question] What does the acronym VM stand for?
     • [Answer] virtual machine
2. Task 2
   • [Question] What tool do we use to interact with the operating system in order to issue commands via the command line, such as the one to start our VPN connection? It’s also known as a console or shell.
     • [Answer] terminal
3. Task 3
   • [Question] What service do we use to form our VPN connection into HTB labs?
     • [Answer] openvpn
4. Task 4
   • [Question] What is the abbreviated name for a ‚tunnel interface‘ in the output of your VPN boot-up sequence output?
     • [Answer] tun
5. Task 5
   • [Question] What tool do we use to test our connection to the target with an ICMP echo request?
     • [Answer] nmap
6. Task 6
   • [Question] What service do we identify on port 23/tcp during our scans?
     • [Answer] telnet
7. Task 7
   • [Question] What username is able to log into the target over telnet with a blank password?
     • [Answer] root
8. Task 8
   • [Question] Submit root flag (Looking for point 6 in tutorial section)

I hope you enjoyed this write-up. 
Have fun testing it yourself!

-McGreen