Completed another Hack The Box machine focused on Active Directory exploitation and privilege escalation.

The attack involved SMB enumeration, credential discovery through log analysis, Kerberos authentication, Shadow Credentials abuse, and DLL hijacking to gain user-level access. Further enumeration revealed a WSUS infrastructure weakness, allowing exploitation through Kerberos delegation abuse, certificate-based authentication, and a WSUS machine-in-the-middle attack to achieve Domain Admin privileges. This challenge strengthened my understanding of modern AD attack paths, Kerberos abuse techniques, and enterprise infrastructure security.

#HackTheBox #HTB #CyberSecurity #ActiveDirectory #RedTeam #PenetrationTesting #OffensiveSecurity #EthicalHacking #InfoSec …

Learn MoreHack The Box: Logging Machine Walkthrough – Medium Difficulty

The post Hack The Box: Logging Machine Walkthrough – Medium Difficulty appeared first on Threatninja.net.

Just completed the DevArea machine from Hack The Box!

After exploiting a vulnerable Java SOAP service on port 8080, I gained initial access and discovered Hoverfly running on port 8888. Leveraging CVE-2025-54123, I successfully authenticated and delivered a reverse shell, securing the User flag as the dev_ryan user.

For privilege escalation, I took advantage of a sudo permission on the SysWatch management script. By exploiting a symlink attack in the logging functionality, I was able to read /root/root.txt and capture the Root flag.

Really enjoyed this Medium-difficulty box — great mix of Java deserialization/SOAP, API exploitation, and creative Linux privilege escalation!

#HackTheBox #HTB #PenetrationTesting #CyberSecurity #PrivilegeEscalation #CVE #EthicalHacking …

Learn MoreHack The Box: DevArea Machine Walkthrough – Medium Difficulty

The post Hack The Box: DevArea Machine Walkthrough – Medium Difficulty appeared first on Threatninja.net.