John, I know you're a professional and im still a beginner .. but this was the first 'CTF' that i faced in THM and its labeled as easy. This was impressive but watching you fly through this was very discouraging lol. I've gone through the rooms up to this point in the "complete beginner" path, ive taken notes, studied, and re-read rooms... and i got to this and my brain just fried watching you do this. I couldn't follow what you were doing, you were running so many cmd pages and dropping commands left and right, it was hard to keep up. This is 100% educational and inspiring at least, but holy Christ. I'm subbing now... lol
I'm pretty sure he mention that he did the room previously to making the video, but still It wouldn't surprise me if he flew through it. I just did the ctf after around 3 months of learning in the junior pentest path and got stuck in various places running around in circles hahaha. Still I think is a great way to learn to watch someone so experienced to things because we can learn so fu...ng much. Good luck on your learning journey
John - absolutely loving the videos dude. I'm an absolute level 0 n00b so some of this was over my head, but trying my best to work hard and grasp the basics! Appreciate the effort you put into your videos and the time you spend to explain things, you're a top dude. Peace!
I really wanted to do this room without help, but man... there is just some things i do not know and the 'basic' room did not teach! Thanks for the walkthrough, took notes while following along and trying to figure out as you gave info.
To be honest as an absolute beginner in the cyber security space, watching videos like this makes me doubt myself, but excites and scares me all the same time
Its like learning to code, I remember feeling like shit when learning OOP, today is a second nature and so is ethical hacking, there is a lot to learn, networking, pentesting tool, a bit of programming, linux, windows etc.. but you will get there ! It takes time, lot of it and more with practice
Well he's absolutely ripping through the challenge at one million miles per hour, so....don't feel bad. He clearly posted this video to showcase his skills and speed, not to teach others. He couldn't possibly type, switch screens/apps, speak any faster than the pace he's moving in this video. Change the playback speed to 1/4 speed and you'll still see he's moving quickly.
@@iCyberVenomhe clearly stated he spent a while in this before recording. The video is nearly 20 minutes and the box is just about as easy and beginner friendly as they come. He was not trying to show off his skill. It’s clear you need to practice alot. Good luck and cheer up.
Oh wow, that took me hours 😆 I'm going to write down everything you did here because that was just beautiful seeing how efficiently you got through it.
At first I was kind of afraid of not manage to complete this room. But watching your video makes me understand every concept tha I have been through in the path "Web fundamentals" and make this room way less scarier 🤣🤣🤣 Great video
Thank you, every day I learn something new, also thanks to you John, you are very fast, but there is no limit to repeat the video (haha). All the best from Rotterdam.
netcat is actually in there. You can redirect the STDERR output to STDOUT (as no result were shown in the portal.php page). Here's the command for that 10:50 : $ nc --version 2>&1 $ nc -h 2>&1 $ man nc That way, any error (stderr) will be prompted in the web page (stdout), instead of staying blank ^^. $ nc --version doesn't exist
Yep. I found out netcat was on there via man nc, and then I used msfvenom to get the reverse shell. The part that had me stumped was how to get ROOT, ironically. "sudo -s" gave me some sort of error (forgot what it was exactly), su root prompted me for a password I couldn't figure out (I don't think ROOT even has a password in this one. I wonder if it works if you just hit enter without typing anything in) so I never would have thought of trying "sudo su root" which worked without asking for a password. When I saw "you can run all, nopasswd" I thought it meant you could run all commands that don't require a password (i.e. guest access) so I spent a while trying to dig around to see if there was some sort of local privilege escalation exploit but gave up and was asking for help on the discord, then I frustratedly tried sudo cat /etc/shadow after someone pointed out "Doesn't one thing stick out?" and it worked, then I tried sudo su root and got root.
I'm beginner and this is my 3rd machine, I completed it without running a reverse shell, but the fact is I tried to :') I will keep this way to run a revershe shell, thanks!
I like the way you take notes. I am going to implement it since I can use text files over different operating systems. I used Burp suite which didn't work for this room. Typically Burp suite will show the pages of a website which was not the case for this room. I joined THM about a week ago, with a background in IT hardware, so this has been a challenge. Thank you for your video.
7:30 searching for incredibly difficult workarounds, while all he had to do was just add the filename to the base URL since they're located in the webroot, lol.
It’s worthy to do the basic rooms in TryHackMe. OpenVPN, Linux Basics and Vulnversity. Just those three are enough to understand everything. Personal experience haha
Hello, when I walked through this room, I googled commands to output the file contents and one of them was "nl". It is not forbidden and is on the system. And file "second ingredients" I read with the command: "nl /home/rick/second\ ingredients". It's great that you can go through it in different ways.
I still haven't learned all the stuff he did in the last few minutes. I did the web app hacking path and it taught me a lot but I still feel like it didn't prepare me for this exercise.
The first two flags were simple. But the third was stuck on because i couldn't figure out how review the source code for the php page, even though we didn't need it. Python3 didn't work for me so i had to see if the perl and php commands work which they did. A php shell wouldnt connect but perl reverse shell worked. I going to revisit this room once i really all fet a hold of what im learning . Been working on the support side of IT for 9 years so this is a new realm for me.
7:00 echo < clue.txt this shell code will not print the contents of the clue.txt file. You probably got confused with this (bash only): echo "$(< clue.txt)" Thanks for the video, very nice to watch :)
@@bmbiz No... The whole point of using that instead of cat in the context of the video was that you couldn't use cat... echo "$(< clue.txt)" will print the contents of clue.txt without external programs
@@emanuele6 Not sure how you read what I wrote and concluded that I was unaware of that. My comment is a simple fact that people who aren't well-versed in Bash probably don't know.
@@bmbiz That is what he was trying to do in the video; printing the contents of clue.txt, so it is obvious that that is what this shell code is doing in my opinion :/ Also you wrote "is equivalent, but faster": 1. that is arguably true: it's not guaranteed anywhere that $(
@@emanuele6 Oh, yes, sure, make your long, clueless, point-missing statement then say "we don't need to discuss it any more". Trust me, Skippy, having a continued dialog with someone is obviously socially inept, if not crippled, is not high on my list. Ponder, though, whether your reaction to what is a harmless post about some Bash facts is appropriate. That's right "facts"...everything I said can be found in the Bash man page, you amazing Whiz Kid. LOL.
I am way late to this party and had been avoiding watching this so I could try it blind. To add on to the cat equivalents that others have posted, for stuff outside the served paths I was doing e.g. ‘base64 /etc/passwd | base64 -d’. Used nc to get the reverse shell, got root via a different path because I was manually enumerating for practice and found something else before I even tried a sudo.
doing it I only got to the part where the command can be executed, where the reverse shell was done, but then I had to watch this video and even so it took me about 2 hours in total to complete this CTF, and that was an easy level...
Oh man as a noob, I tired to follow getting the stable shell and can't get it to work.. Went to the poor mans pentest video and still didn't know what was going on 😂
Great video you kind of lost me when it came to python3 and using reverse shell engineering...but thanks..Could you please do a video on reverse shells...much appreciated
At 7:15 instead of the script (I liked that as I alway wanted to learn more of bash) you could have used 'tac' command in Linux which is opposite of 'cat' as it starts printing from bottom towards the top.
I've been trying for ages to use gtfo bins for privilege escalation in the command line, I'm assuming now having watched this video that it won't work and I'm looking in the wrong place and only a reverse shell is the answer?
![BOWKYLION - วิงวอน (ex-change) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cLdnZWDaO-w/mqdefault.jpg)
I wish to understand what is happening on my screen right now, but I love watching stuff like this
i dont know why im watching this... i just am
Same ..
Lookup Red Hat courses if you want to learn linux :)
@@Nossody or just use linux and consume someones legg because that also helps
@@Jib420Half way through the video I asked myself, "how the hell did I get here?"
John, I know you're a professional and im still a beginner .. but this was the first 'CTF' that i faced in THM and its labeled as easy. This was impressive but watching you fly through this was very discouraging lol. I've gone through the rooms up to this point in the "complete beginner" path, ive taken notes, studied, and re-read rooms... and i got to this and my brain just fried watching you do this. I couldn't follow what you were doing, you were running so many cmd pages and dropping commands left and right, it was hard to keep up. This is 100% educational and inspiring at least, but holy Christ. I'm subbing now... lol
I will come back to this video in the future and I vow to be able to understand this video
I just got lost. I was doing well with easy rooms but now im initimidated
I'm pretty sure he mention that he did the room previously to making the video, but still It wouldn't surprise me if he flew through it. I just did the ctf after around 3 months of learning in the junior pentest path and got stuck in various places running around in circles hahaha. Still I think is a great way to learn to watch someone so experienced to things because we can learn so fu...ng much. Good luck on your learning journey
yeh fr, I got lost when I see him doing things. I have learnt so many things like u but it's still not enough
@@kutloano.mp4 come back 😂
John - absolutely loving the videos dude. I'm an absolute level 0 n00b so some of this was over my head, but trying my best to work hard and grasp the basics! Appreciate the effort you put into your videos and the time you spend to explain things, you're a top dude. Peace!
I really wanted to do this room without help, but man... there is just some things i do not know and the 'basic' room did not teach! Thanks for the walkthrough, took notes while following along and trying to figure out as you gave info.
To be honest as an absolute beginner in the cyber security space, watching videos like this makes me doubt myself, but excites and scares me all the same time
Its like learning to code, I remember feeling like shit when learning OOP, today is a second nature and so is ethical hacking, there is a lot to learn, networking, pentesting tool, a bit of programming, linux, windows etc.. but you will get there !
It takes time, lot of it and more with practice
I feel the same way lol
Well he's absolutely ripping through the challenge at one million miles per hour, so....don't feel bad. He clearly posted this video to showcase his skills and speed, not to teach others. He couldn't possibly type, switch screens/apps, speak any faster than the pace he's moving in this video. Change the playback speed to 1/4 speed and you'll still see he's moving quickly.
how is it going after 9 months ?
@@iCyberVenomhe clearly stated he spent a while in this before recording. The video is nearly 20 minutes and the box is just about as easy and beginner friendly as they come. He was not trying to show off his skill. It’s clear you need to practice alot. Good luck and cheer up.
Oh wow, that took me hours 😆 I'm going to write down everything you did here because that was just beautiful seeing how efficiently you got through it.
I learn a lot from this video. Thanks.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh thanks for the tipp with the reverse shell, i was really stuck at that point XD
Hey John! Please create more THM videos, as they are very good for understanding new concepts and ways to exploit a box.
Thank You !
Me: Omg, Jon! How many command lines do you know???
Jon: Yes.
John
@@sindrejensen665 cena
That question doesn't even make sense
The amount of knowledge this guy possesses is just crazy
I like how you explain what you were doing.
Thanks John! That was my first ctf, i learned a lot trying stuff and your video gave me the tips i’m not aware of at the moment to run forward.
Your content has helped me learn so many things. My brain has one wrinkle in it now. Thank you
Big fan ! I do learn a lot from you, I'll make sure to support whenever I'll be able to do that. GREAT JOB
What a great series. Please keep doing these! :)
At first I was kind of afraid of not manage to complete this room.
But watching your video makes me understand every concept tha I have been through in the path "Web fundamentals" and make this room way less scarier 🤣🤣🤣
Great video
Thank you, every day I learn something new, also thanks to you John, you are very fast, but there is no limit to repeat the video (haha). All the best from Rotterdam.
netcat is actually in there. You can redirect the STDERR output to STDOUT (as no result were shown in the portal.php page). Here's the command for that 10:50 :
$ nc --version 2>&1
$ nc -h 2>&1
$ man nc
That way, any error (stderr) will be prompted in the web page (stdout), instead of staying blank ^^.
$ nc --version doesn't exist
Yep. I found out netcat was on there via man nc, and then I used msfvenom to get the reverse shell. The part that had me stumped was how to get ROOT, ironically. "sudo -s" gave me some sort of error (forgot what it was exactly), su root prompted me for a password I couldn't figure out (I don't think ROOT even has a password in this one. I wonder if it works if you just hit enter without typing anything in) so I never would have thought of trying "sudo su root" which worked without asking for a password.
When I saw "you can run all, nopasswd" I thought it meant you could run all commands that don't require a password (i.e. guest access) so I spent a while trying to dig around to see if there was some sort of local privilege escalation exploit but gave up and was asking for help on the discord, then I frustratedly tried sudo cat /etc/shadow after someone pointed out "Doesn't one thing stick out?" and it worked, then I tried sudo su root and got root.
Glad I read your comment this is just brilliant.
for the cat "file" that didn't work, less did :) Very nice walkthrough. It was a fun box :)
I'm beginner and this is my 3rd machine, I completed it without running a reverse shell, but the fact is I tried to :') I will keep this way to run a revershe shell, thanks!
I like the way you take notes. I am going to implement it since I can use text files over different operating systems. I used Burp suite which didn't work for this room. Typically Burp suite will show the pages of a website which was not the case for this room. I joined THM about a week ago, with a background in IT hardware, so this has been a challenge. Thank you for your video.
strings also helps in the portal.php page. Good stuff
Loved the recap at the end. Also perfect editing of the video.
7:30 searching for incredibly difficult workarounds, while all he had to do was just add the filename to the base URL since they're located in the webroot, lol.
Commands: less and tac work to read the files. Also everything was doable from the website, aka without a shell
I remember thinking, "It's impressive he knows multiple paths to get where he wants to go, but there's no way this is the easiest path"
Thanks John, this is video is very helpful
@John Hammond you can also use wildcards to evade that type of blacklist: /bin/ca? *.txt will work
Hey i've see that thumbnail somewhere...
All this it's awesome, at the beginning, I didn't know how to upload rev' sh, but from now on I can see it's very easy. 'E= Congratulations!
This was an excellent example of owning a box. Great job using the poor mans pentest, it’s really an awesome accomplishment.
What is the poor man pentest ?
I tried using head, cat and less, and less was the only one who worked. But happy to learn the grep . approach. !
Damn, you make it look so easy. Hard to follow as a beginner, as I don't always understand. But I will get there. NICE
excellent presentation John!
This is not even close to how I did this ctf. But thats the cool part, there are so many ways to tackle the same room
Type things in and hit the enter button to submit a comment. Thanks for making this video my dude.
I didn't understand anything but i still watched the whole video.
It’s worthy to do the basic rooms in TryHackMe. OpenVPN, Linux Basics and Vulnversity. Just those three are enough to understand everything. Personal experience haha
Hello, when I walked through this room, I googled commands to output the file contents and one of them was "nl". It is not forbidden and is on the system. And file "second ingredients" I read with the command: "nl /home/rick/second\ ingredients". It's great that you can go through it in different ways.
Cheers John
man i would love to see another king of the hill livestream
Wow…..thank you. This is great
You are an awesome mentor.. Thanx you helped a lot and know i started my own channel..
that... was.. TOTALLY AWESOME!!! I wanna do stuff like this too! By the way your typing speed is insane!
I like ur workflow👍
I still haven't learned all the stuff he did in the last few minutes. I did the web app hacking path and it taught me a lot but I still feel like it didn't prepare me for this exercise.
less works better than cat for me, in most situations. Great video, thank you!
The first two flags were simple. But the third was stuck on because i couldn't figure out how review the source code for the php page, even though we didn't need it.
Python3 didn't work for me so i had to see if the perl and php commands work which they did. A php shell wouldnt connect but perl reverse shell worked.
I going to revisit this room once i really all fet a hold of what im learning . Been working on the support side of IT for 9 years so this is a new realm for me.
7:00
echo < clue.txt
this shell code will not print the contents of the clue.txt file.
You probably got confused with this (bash only):
echo "$(< clue.txt)"
Thanks for the video, very nice to watch :)
Which is equivalent to the command substitution "$(cat clue.txt)" ... but faster.
@@bmbiz No... The whole point of using that instead of cat in the context of the video was that you couldn't use cat...
echo "$(< clue.txt)" will print the contents of clue.txt without external programs
@@emanuele6 Not sure how you read what I wrote and concluded that I was unaware of that. My comment is a simple fact that people who aren't well-versed in Bash probably don't know.
@@bmbiz That is what he was trying to do in the video; printing the contents of clue.txt, so it is obvious that that is what this shell code is doing in my opinion :/
Also you wrote "is equivalent, but faster":
1. that is arguably true: it's not guaranteed anywhere that $(
@@emanuele6 Oh, yes, sure, make your long, clueless, point-missing statement then say "we don't need to discuss it any more". Trust me, Skippy, having a continued dialog with someone is obviously socially inept, if not crippled, is not high on my list. Ponder, though, whether your reaction to what is a harmless post about some Bash facts is appropriate. That's right "facts"...everything I said can be found in the Bash man page, you amazing Whiz Kid. LOL.
He is in another dimension!
Kind of cool to see the Thumbnail work you did yesterday live today. Great video. Keep up the great work you're doing.
🎥🎬🍿 Its like SecDork movie night! 🍿🎬🎥
I am way late to this party and had been avoiding watching this so I could try it blind. To add on to the cat equivalents that others have posted, for stuff outside the served paths I was doing e.g. ‘base64 /etc/passwd | base64 -d’. Used nc to get the reverse shell, got root via a different path because I was manually enumerating for practice and found something else before I even tried a sudo.
if you get revershell running with python 3 all you need to do is "sudo bash" and you have root access.
You are awesome
Love you John
Thanks for the help!
Rough seeing LastPass knowing what we now know.
Really enjoy your videos
Holuy shit John you are a ninja at this!
Ive seen the intervieuws with networkchuck & David Bombal. And what u do is amazing!
Great video! By the way you can solve the entire thing from the website command panel (without any reverse shell)
Liked, already subscribed, and I'm typing things to then press enter.
doing it I only got to the part where the command can be executed, where the reverse shell was done, but then I had to watch this video and even so it took me about 2 hours in total to complete this CTF, and that was an easy level...
Very nice. I actually used strings to cat out.
Love your videos dude! This was awesome!!!
It's seems so easy for you.. i'am a beginner and it was a little hard for me to understand all stuff ;) Love your vidéo Thx
WTF the voice of this guy is deep af
To bypass blacklist in command panel we could just use "less" command
I understood 80% of the video, I'm proud of myself.
i love watching this
gracias amigo, you rock!
What a ninja.
Thanks dude
Thank you!!!
A great video that you made look very simple.
Woah, this is a really advanced room...
It's actually not - he made it more complex than it had to be
A web server that executes arbitrary commands, with a couple command blacklists? Man. They should have used a restricted shell for those results.
Oh man as a noob, I tired to follow getting the stable shell and can't get it to work.. Went to the poor mans pentest video and still didn't know what was going on 😂
Gotta say, it's impossible for me to follow that without pausing this but bravo!
the 2nd command I used after the cat failed was less, and it just worked! haha, weird they blocked head but not less
Thank you for this helpful vid
well I was stuck commands panel that which commands are blacklisted, to figureout that part
Fantastic video!
My machine failed to form a reverse shell using your code from github and the online reverse shell generator. What could actually be the problem?
Love the way he teaches these stuff.
Dude, how did you learn all this?
i don't understand what is he doing, but it's so fun to watch.
I dont understand why we have to do lot of things we have never learn before this room...
You're so smart 😵💫
I started getting lost after you popped the reverse shell...lol
Superb sir ❤️❤️
Great video you kind of lost me when it came to python3 and using reverse shell engineering...but thanks..Could you please do a video on reverse shells...much appreciated
I’m suprised you used such a complictaed solution to the cat command. I just used less lol
Suffering from knowing too much
just typed the file name on the browser url bar -.-
I did too lmao, less -FX
@@cortex-technologies same
@@Helena-xb8io suffering from success
I don't understand anything that is going on but its super entertaining
Is cybersecurity or software more advantageous? Which should we specialize in
I cant keep up, im bout to give this shit up
Thanks for the super neat walkthrough John.
Could you please share the link to the video on setting up a stable reverse shell?
python -c 'import pty;pty.spawn("/bin/bash")'
Ctrlz
stty raw -echo
fg
Enter key 2 times
export TERM=xterm
Wow so many techniques 😬
nice stuff! ive gotten into linux a little, have it running on my laptop and RasPI but nothing as cool as this!
At 7:15 instead of the script (I liked that as I alway wanted to learn more of bash) you could have used 'tac' command in Linux which is opposite of 'cat' as it starts printing from bottom towards the top.
you ran stabilize_shell on your local machine then you got stabilize shell access on the remote machine? there's a step missing here.
Can you point me to a separate video to understand getting the stabilize shell setup, linepeas tried to follow up but too fast. You are a king of CTF
I've been trying for ages to use gtfo bins for privilege escalation in the command line, I'm assuming now having watched this video that it won't work and I'm looking in the wrong place and only a reverse shell is the answer?
love ur videosss keep up the good work btw i just did less clue.txt its worked well :)
Damn... it looks powerful to use commands like that