Welp, rooted. That’s quite a few hours of my life that I’m never going to get back…
This may be the first box that I’m going to dislike, mainly due to the user part. It’s just a whole slew of grinding over and over on something that you’ll hardly see in the real world. I usually don’t mind CTFy boxes, but this one definitely touched a nerve.
Anyways, some hints for this:
User: Like others said, port 80 is not useless. The high port may look daunting, but the technique used to dump the information is pretty old. Only one of the in***** are useful…
Root: The entire path to root doesn’t go far from the high port. To begin, you got to keep quiet and listen.
Once you are more privileged, it’s time to go back to the basics.
One final note: It is not recommended to do this box on free servers if you want to get value out of the privesc. The server is slow, it gets reset often, and it’s pretty much impossible to get root without being spoiled (Learned that the hard way unfortunately :()
PM me for more hints, though my patience’s about out with this box.