Just finished the Insane difficulty Eloquia machine on Hack The Box which one of the more layered and creative Windows boxes I’ve done in a while.

The path starts with a custom Django publishing platform that integrates with a Qoogle OAuth service. After registering and creating articles, you discover that the application trusts certain meta-refresh tags and can be leveraged for redirects. Combined with OAuth authorization flows and a bit of CSRF, this opens the door to higher-privilege access inside the web application.

From the admin interface, SQL Explorer becomes available. Because the backend is SQLite, `load_extension` can be abused to load a malicious DLL. That gives the first reverse shell as the `eloquia\web` user and the user flag.

Privilege escalation requires deeper enumeration. Edge browser credentials stored for the Olivia.KAT account can be extracted and decrypted offline. WinRM then provides a stable shell as that user. From there, Seatbelt and process enumeration reveal an interesting custom service called Failure2Ban that runs with high privileges and periodically restarts. By racing a binary overwrite of `Failure2Ban.exe` with a reverse shell, you land as `NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM` and grab the root flag.

What made this machine feel genuinely Insane was the number of different skill sets required: web application logic, OAuth/CSRF, SQLite extension loading, Windows credential dumping, service abuse under AppLocker and PowerShell restrictions, and careful timing for the final binary overwrite.

Great learning experience overall.

#HackTheBox #CTF #PenetrationTesting #WindowsPrivilegeEscalation #RedTeam #InfoSec #Eloquia #InsaneBox …

Learn MoreHack The Box: Eloquia Machine Walkthrough – Insane Difficulty

The post Hack The Box: Eloquia Machine Walkthrough – Insane Difficulty appeared first on Threatninja.net.

A few days ago I built Onionservatory, because apparently Onion Services also deserve to be judged by automated security tools.

It answers questions like:

1
2

There are plenty of tools that will happily tell you that your normal website is terrible.

MDN HTTP Observatory will inspect your HTTP security configuration. SecurityHeaders will judge your headers.

Welcome back, pentesters!

The more experienced a hacker becomes, the harder they are to detect. Beginners are often noisy and leave plenty of traces behind. As they gain experience, they learn to think like defenders and understand how detection actually works.

Today, we’re going to look at a tool that can hide your processes. It’s Zapper. We’ve already seen reports of it being used by hackers to masquerade their long running processes and make them look legitimate.

What is Zapper?

Zapper is a tool created by Hacker’s Choice. Unlike a lot of crude hiding methods, it actually works well. Zapper doesn’t need root privileges to run and it can work even as a static binary, one you can rename too.

Not only can you hide the command line itself, but the environment variables of a process too, along with what’s in /proc/<PID>/environ. The tool doesn’t depend on LD_PRELOAD or libc tricks, it uses ptrace() to manipulate the ELF Auxiliary Vector instead. The performance overhead is tiny, so you won’t even notice it.

Using Zapper

First you need to get the binary. Let’s use the command from the project repository:

bash$ > curl -fL -o zapper https://github.com/hackerschoice/zapper/releases/latest/download/zapper-linux-$(uname -m) && chmod 755 zapper && ./zapper -h

Defenders often monitor traffic and certain keywords may trigger alerts. So it’s best to rename the tool and then host it on your C2. 

bash$ > mv zapper systemd-control

Here we renamed the binary to systemd-control. On many Linux distros, the actual systemd components live inside /lib/systemd, so placing the renamed file there and changing the timestamps can make it hard to catch, unless someone’s monitoring that directory too. That’s basically why you as a defender can’t rely purely on filename based detection.

The help menu has plenty of examples and shows some creative ways you can use the tool:

bash$ > ./systemd-control -h

Hackers can hide binaries along with their child processes. They can create hidden tmux sessions to maintain persistence on a server without showing up in normal process listings. They can also leave the program name exposed but strip all the command line options, making the process look generic.

For the demonstration we’ll hide an nmap scan and all its arguments:

bash$ > exec ./systemd-control -f -a '[kworker/2:2-events_power_efficient]' nmap IP -Pn -sV -sC > /dev/shm/scan.txt &

This command makes it look like a kernel worker thread. Most admins would just ignore it. While it’s running, you won’t find it anywhere with ps or any other tool. The scan results were saved in /dev/shm/scan.txt, that proves it worked.

bash$ > ps aux | grep nmap 
# no nmap in ps

bash$ > cat scan.txt

You should try it on a pentest to emulate a realistic threat and see whether defenders can catch it.

Summary

Zapper can help when you need to hide a suspicious long running process. It masquerades them as something legitimate that every admin would just skip past. The commands and arguments can’t be found in /proc either. You don’t need root to work with it, so it’s suitable for a lot of engagements. With all these qualities, it gained popularity fast and has already been seen in DFIR reports on cyberattacks.

If you like Linux and want to advance your skills, consider joining our Advanced Linux for Hackers training.

The post Linux: Zapper – How Hackers Hide Malicious Process first appeared on Hackers Arise.

CISA's Binding Operational Directive 26-04, issued June 10, 2026, replaces the KEV directive with a four-variable risk model: asset exposure, KEV status, exploit automation, and technical impact. CISA publishes three of the four answers generically per CVE. The two that decide whether prioritization is defensible (real exposure and real impact in your environment) can only be proven by testing the asset the way an adversary would. Continuous, human-validated pentesting is built to produce that evidence.

The post BOD 26-04 Makes Exploitability the Priority Signal: Scanners Can’t Measure It appeared first on Synack.