Newb question

Hello everyone, can anyone help me. I’ve tried a couple of the easy boxes. I scan them with nmap, and I never get the operating system. I assumed that on the easy ones, I would be able to find out what OS they have. Am I doing something wrong, or am I not properly connected to the site.

Thank you for any help you can give.

Best nmap can do is guess. The way it guesses is by the reply of the open ports and such. If there are not many open ports to none it wont tell you anything as far as os goes.

You can try nmap -sT -O IPADDR

Sometime the only clue you will have is what is on the machines Info Card and what you can scrounge in the various discussions on the box in question.

There are other ways to find what specific os is on a box… example IIS is windows. Now if you find the version of IIS you can look it up on MS website and see what version the os is. Use your imagination and dont get stuck on it.

when you ping, you can know

64 bytes from 192.168.0.12: icmp_seq=3 ttl=128 time=0.214 ms ttl=128 > windows
64 bytes from 192.168.0.66: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.029 ms ttl=64 > linux

https://subinsb.com/default-device-ttl-values/

For me, nmap -n -v -Pn -p- -A --reason x.x.x.x works. nmap tries its best to detect the OS based on at least one open port and one close port. I’d say nmap is 90% correct on the OS.

Thank you for your responses. I tried pinging it, and this is what I get. That’s all that came up. I think that I’m still doing something wrong.

root@kali:~# ping 10.10.10.140
PING 10.10.10.140 (10.10.10.140) 56(84) bytes of data.

Hmm. Do you get the tun0 interface when you do a ifconfig?

No, I don’t.

Is there something that you have to do, before hacking a box? Like, before you scan the ip, is there something that you do to connect to a box?

Ah, you need to download the openvpn connection file first, then connect to HTB VPN.

i did that part. I downloaded it. Then I typed “openvpn sac.ovpn” or something like that. And that all worked. I think. Do I have to redo that every time I log on?

So, I have refined my dumb question. Can someone tell me what the “start machine” icon looks like?

Just for my curiosity, what machines are you doing?

@sac yeh buddy, you need to run that each time you want to attempt boxes. Open up a terminal, run that, leave it open as you work ect.

Type your comment> @saminskip said:

@sac yeh buddy, you need to run that each time you want to attempt boxes. Open up a terminal, run that, leave it open as you work ect.

Ok. so, once I do that, I just have a cursor with nothing behind it. So I can’t run any commands. So what do I push next so that I can start working? If I push ctrl-c, then that will disconnect me, right?

@saminskip said:
@sac yeh buddy, you need to run that each time you want to attempt boxes. Open up a terminal, run that, leave it open as you work ect.

YES!!! I’m in! Thank you so much! And thank you to everyone who commented :slight_smile: