Getting the foothold took a good 5 days. At least two of those days were spent crying with mango juice stinging my eyes! Then I realized I had to go away and learn a new skill, and I also learned that there are only really two main types of fruit I needed to worry about (hint).
User and root were a fairly quick affair using tricks already learned from the other beginner machines.
Looking through my notes on this box, the information that forms the path is definitely all on the box. No guessing needed at all.
The main takeaway for me would be to never underestimate the power of a good sleep.
Feel free to PM me for hints. I won’t tell you the answers, but I will help you get there.
PSA for whoever gets the root flag by sending it to their own vm/computer: make sure to rm the . *** .his *** y file!
I stumbled upon someone’s OVPN IP in said file earlier while looking through USER’s home directory for ways to get to root.
User: think outside of the box, dirb and gobuster can help you to find the URL, but actually you don’t need neither of them, the link is exactly in front of your eyes, just enumerate the page you see.
After finding the login page, find out what kind of database mango is using. search for privilege escalation for that service on google.
Just completed both user and root a few minutes ago thanks to the great assist from @Merlin01000101 . Great nudge that didn’t ruin anything and allowed me to still solve. I’ll echo most everyone else and say that once you have the initial foothold, this was pretty easy…but that first part…ugh…not easy for me.
Hi @mrZapp . You are on the right track and what I think you are referring to is called being ‘Blind’. Unfortunately, being blind does limit how you can eat that mango, but you can still eat it!
Hi @mrZapp . You are on the right track and what I think you are referring to is called being ‘Blind’. Unfortunately, being blind does limit how you can eat that mango, but you can still eat it!
I don’t have a clue why there are so few questions in the forums about finding the login page. That, to me, was by far the most frustrating part (probably because I wasn’t very familiar with the technologies). Everything else made sense to me, and was a lot of fun.
Still trying to find my way to foothold and wana confirm that I’m not in a rabbit hole.
So far I’ve found a login page and a directory v****/
Am I correct when I’m assuming that the backend is a P** and m*****b combo?
Am I on the right track with the login page?
I’ve read the whole thread and… still no idea how to find that login page… I’ve looked at the certificate. The only thing that might have some significance, as far as I know, is the s*****g-o***r.mango.htb. But I don’t know what to do with it. I suppose there is a concept I am missing. That will be the third day that I am trying to figure it out.
My assumption is that the login page is on another ip… But if that is the case, which one ? and how to find it ?
rooted!!!
getting initial user(s) was really hard, its very new topic for me but after that its just running, now i got some new techniques.
thanks for the box !
Feel free to PM me.
Haven’t felt this much joy and agony for the long time while struggling with the foothold/user. The easy root felt quite good actually after all the despair.
Thank you very much @MrR3boot! I learned a lot!
I don’t have any addition to the tips already given here. PM if you need help and I might be able to help you out! Not gonna write that script for you tho.
1º It’s important to enumerate in this box, but Dirbuster won’t lead you where you need.
2º When you are starting with one HTB machine, it’s a good practice to try the Vhost (name of the machine) + .htb. In some instances, you might get additional Vhosts which are worth checking as well.
3º If you arrive to a login page, you are on the right path.
4º The mango is a word play related to the technology to research. Mango is not a mango, but is close to it.
5º Once you figure out the technology, research how you could exploit it. There are different articles on the Internet. One of those articles will give you an idea about how to proceed further.
6º My advice would be to play first with burp and the repeater, in order to get a slight idea about how to design your attack. Then, create your own script. This was the best part for me.
Root: Basic enumeration. It’s way easier than user, and I am sure you have solved other machines this way.