Meow – Hack the Box
Meow is the 1st box in Hack the Box Starting Point that you will encounter which is in the Very Easy category.
- “What does the acronym VM stand for?” Virtual Machine
- “What tool do we use to interact with the operating system in order to issue commands via the command line, such as the one to start our VPN connection? It’s also known as a console or shell.” Terminal
- “What service do we use to form our VPN connection into HTB labs?” openvpn
- “What tool do we use to test our connection to the target with an ICMP echo request?” ping
- “What is the name of the most common tool for finding open ports on a target?” nmap
- “What service do we identify on port 23/tcp during our scans?” telnet
- “What username is able to log into the target over telnet with a blank password?” root
To get the flag open up nmap and scan the IP using nmap 10.129.53.45 -p- –open or just nmap 10.129.53.45 or another popular flag is -sV to get the service version running on the open ports using nmap 10.129.53.45 -sV (go and read up on nmap and the different flags)
You will see a response such as below showing that port 23 is open: (Port 23 is used to telnet to a machine but it transmits data in clear text and should not be used in production)
Now use telnet to connect to the server: (telnet IP_Address)
You get prompted to login to the server, try the usual usernames like root, admin, administrator.
In this case just logging in with root and pressing enter logged us in without a password.
Type whoami to check if you are infact the root user.
Type ls to show a list of files and folders and you will see the flag.txt file. Run cat flag.txt to retrieve the flag and copy / paste it as your answer.
The above walk through is also available in the below video: