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Getting Started

This module covers the fundamentals of penetration testing and an introduction to Hack The Box.

4.86

Created by mrb3n
Co-Authors: 21y4d

Fundamental Offensive

Summary

This module introduces core penetration testing concepts, getting started with Hack The Box, a step-by-step walkthrough of your first HTB box, problem-solving, and how to be successful in general when beginning in the field. In this module, we will cover:

  • An overview of Information Security
  • Penetration testing distros
  • Common terms and technologies
  • Scanning and enumeration basics
  • Using public exploits
  • Shells, privilege escalation, and transferring files
  • Navigating the HTB platform
  • A step-by-step walkthrough of a retired HTB box
  • Common pitfalls and asking questions effectively
  • Completing a box without a walkthrough
  • Next steps in the field

This module is broken down into sections with accompanying hands-on exercises to practice each of the tactics and techniques we cover. The module ends with a practical hands-on skills assessment to gauge your understanding of the various topic areas.

As you work through the module, you will see example commands and command output for the various topics introduced. It is worth reproducing as many of these examples as possible to reinforce further the concepts introduced in each section. You can do this in the Pwnbox provided in the interactive sections or your virtual machine.

You can start and stop the module at any time and pick up where you left off. There is no time limit or "grading," but you must complete all of the exercises and the skills assessment to receive the maximum number of cubes and have this module marked as complete in any paths you have chosen.

The module is classified as "Fundamental" but assumes a working knowledge of the Linux command line and an understanding of information security fundamentals.

A firm grasp of the following modules can be considered prerequisites for successful completion of this module:

  • Introduction to Networking
  • Linux Fundamentals
  • Introduction to Web Applications
  • Web Requests
  • Learning Process

Infosec Overview

Information security (infosec) is a vast field. The field has grown and evolved greatly in the last few years. It offers many specializations, including but not limited to:

  • Network and infrastructure security
  • Application security
  • Security testing
  • Systems auditing
  • Business continuity planning
  • Digital forensics
  • Incident detection and response

In a nutshell, infosec is the practice of protecting data from unauthorized access, changes, unlawful use, disruption, etc. Infosec professionals also take actions to reduce the overall impact of any such incident.

Data can be electronic or physical and tangible (e.g., design blueprints) or intangible (knowledge). A common phrase that will come up many times in our infosec career is protecting the "confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data," or the CIA triad.

Risk Management Process

Data protection must focus on efficient yet effective policy implementation without negatively affecting an organization's business operations and productivity. To achieve this, organizations must follow a process called the risk management process. This process involves the following five steps:

Step Explanation
Identifying the Risk Identifying risks the business is exposed to, such as legal, environmental, market, regulatory, and other types of risks.
Analyze the Risk Analyzing the risks to determine their impact and probability. The risks should be mapped to the organization's various policies, procedures, and business processes.
Evaluate the Risk Evaluating, ranking, and prioritizing risks. Then, the organization must decide to accept (unavoidable), avoid (change plans), control (mitigate), or transfer risk (insure).
Dealing with Risk Eliminating or containing the risks as best as possible. This is handled by interfacing directly with the stakeholders for the system or process that the risk is associated with.
Monitoring Risk All risks must be constantly monitored. Risks should be constantly monitored for any situational changes that could change their impact score, i.e., from low to medium or high impact.

As mentioned previously, the core tenet of infosec is information assurance, or maintaining the CIA of data and making sure that it is not compromised in any way, shape, or form when an incident occurs. An incident could be a natural disaster, system malfunction, or security incident.

Red Team vs. Blue Team

In infosec, we usually hear the terms red team and blue team. In the simplest terms, the red team plays the attackers' role, while the blue team plays the defenders' part.

Red teamers usually play an adversary role in breaking into the organization to identify any potential weaknesses real attackers may utilize to break the organization's defenses. The most common task on the red teaming side is penetration testing, social engineering, and other similar offensive techniques.

On the other hand, the blue team makes up the majority of infosec jobs. It is responsible for strengthening the organization's defenses by analyzing the risks, coming up with policies, responding to threats and incidents, and effectively using security tools and other similar tasks.

Role of Penetration Testers

A security assessor (network penetration tester, web application penetration tester, red teamer, etc.) helps an organization identify risks in its external and internal networks. These risks may include network or web application vulnerabilities, sensitive data exposure, misconfigurations, or issues that could lead to reputational harm. A good tester can work with a client to identify risks to their organization, provide information on how to reproduce these risks, and guidance on either mitigating or remediating the issues identified during testing.

Assessments can take many forms, from a white-box penetration test against all in-scope systems and applications to identify as many vulnerabilities as possible, to a phishing assessment to assess the risk or employee's security awareness, to a targeted red team assessment built around a scenario to emulate a real-world threat actor.

We must understand the bigger picture of the risks an organization faces and its environment to evaluate and rate vulnerabilities discovered during testing accurately. A deep understanding of the risk management process is critical for anyone starting in information security.

This module will focus on how to get started in infosec and penetration testing from a hands-on perspective, specifically selecting and navigating a pentest distro, learning about common technologies and essential tools, learning the levels and the basics of penetration testing, cracking our first box on HTB, how to find and ask for help most effectively, common potential issues, and how to navigate the Hack the Box platform.

While this module uses the Hack The Box platform and purposefully vulnerable machines as examples, the fundamental skills showcased apply to any environment.

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Sections

Relevant Paths

This module progresses you towards the following Paths

Cracking into Hack the Box

Cracking into Hack the Box

To be successful in any technical information security role, we must have a broad understanding of specialized tools, tactics, and terminology. This path introduces core concepts necessary for anyone interested in a hands-on technical infosec role. The modules also provide the essential prerequisite knowledge for joining the main Hack The Box platform, progressing through Starting Point through easy-rated retired machines, and solving "live" machines with no walkthrough. It also includes helpful information about staying organized, navigating the HTB platforms, common pitfalls, and selecting a penetration testing distribution. Students will complete their first box during this path with a guided walkthrough and be challenged to complete a box on their own by applying the knowledge learned in the Getting Started module.

Easy Path Sections 42 Sections
Required: 30
Reward: +30
Path Modules
Web Requests
Fundamental
Path Sections 8 Sections
Reward: +10
This module introduces the topic of HTTP web requests and how different web applications utilize them to communicate with their backends.
JavaScript Deobfuscation
Easy
Path Sections 11 Sections
Reward: +10
This module will take you step-by-step through the fundamentals of JavaScript Deobfuscation until you can deobfuscate basic JavaScript code and understand its purpose.
Getting Started
Fundamental
Path Sections 23 Sections
Reward: +10
This module covers the fundamentals of penetration testing and an introduction to Hack The Box.
Penetration Tester

Penetration Tester

The Penetration Tester Job Role Path is for newcomers to information security who aspire to become professional penetration testers. This path covers core security assessment concepts and provides a deep understanding of the specialized tools, attack tactics, and methodology used during penetration testing. Armed with the necessary theoretical background and multiple practical exercises, students will go through all penetration testing stages, from reconnaissance and enumeration to documentation and reporting. Upon completing this job role path, you will have obtained the practical skills and mindset necessary to perform professional security assessments against enterprise-level infrastructure at an intermediate level. The Information Security Foundations skill path can be considered prerequisite knowledge to be successful while working through this job role path.

Medium Path Sections 491 Sections
Required: 1970
Reward: +450
Path Modules
Penetration Testing Process
Fundamental
Path Sections 15 Sections
Reward: +10
This module teaches the penetration testing process broken down into each stage and discussed in detail. We will cover many aspects of the role of a penetration tester during a penetration test, explained and illustrated with detailed examples. The module also covers pre-engagement steps like the criteria for establishing a contract with a client for a penetration testing engagement.
Getting Started
Fundamental
Path Sections 23 Sections
Reward: +10
This module covers the fundamentals of penetration testing and an introduction to Hack The Box.
Network Enumeration with Nmap
Easy
Path Sections 12 Sections
Reward: +10
Nmap is one of the most used networking mapping and discovery tools because of its accurate results and efficiency. The tool is widely used by both offensive and defensive security practitioners. This module covers fundamentals that will be needed to use the Nmap tool for performing effective network enumeration.
Footprinting
Medium
Path Sections 21 Sections
Reward: +20
This module covers techniques for footprinting the most commonly used services in almost all enterprise and business IT infrastructures. Footprinting is an essential phase of any penetration test or security audit to identify and prevent information disclosure. Using this process, we examine the individual services and attempt to obtain as much information from them as possible.
Information Gathering - Web Edition
Easy
Path Sections 19 Sections
Reward: +20
This module equips learners with essential web reconnaissance skills, crucial for ethical hacking and penetration testing. It explores both active and passive techniques, including DNS enumeration, web crawling, analysis of web archives and HTTP headers, and fingerprinting web technologies.
Vulnerability Assessment
Easy
Path Sections 17 Sections
Reward: +10
This module introduces the concept of Vulnerability Assessments. We will review the differences between vulnerability assessments and penetration tests, how to carry out a vulnerability assessment, how to interpret the assessment results, and how to deliver an effective vulnerability assessment report.
File Transfers
Medium
Path Sections 10 Sections
Reward: +10
During an assessment, it is very common for us to transfer files to and from a target system. This module covers file transfer techniques leveraging tools commonly available across all versions of Windows and Linux systems.
Shells & Payloads
Medium
Path Sections 17 Sections
Reward: +10
Gain the knowledge and skills to identify and use shells & payloads to establish a foothold on vulnerable Windows & Linux systems. This module utilizes a fictitious scenario where the learner will place themselves in the perspective of a sysadmin trying out for a position on CAT5 Security's network penetration testing team.
Using the Metasploit Framework
Easy
Path Sections 15 Sections
Reward: +10
The Metasploit Framework is an open-source set of tools used for network enumeration, attacks, testing security vulnerabilities, evading detection, performing privilege escalation attacks, and performing post-exploitation.
Password Attacks
Medium
Path Sections 22 Sections
Reward: +10
Passwords are still the primary method of authentication in corporate networks. If strong password policies are not in place, users will often opt for weak, easy-to-remember passwords that can often be cracked offline and used to further our access. We will encounter passwords in many forms during our assessments. We must understand the various ways they are stored, how they can be retrieved, methods to crack weak passwords, ways to use hashes that cannot be cracked, and hunting for weak/default password usage.
Attacking Common Services
Medium
Path Sections 19 Sections
Reward: +20
Organizations regularly use a standard set of services for different purposes. It is vital to conduct penetration testing activities on each service internally and externally to ensure that they are not introducing security threats. This module will cover how to enumerate each service and test it against known vulnerabilities and exploits with a standard set of tools.
Pivoting, Tunneling, and Port Forwarding
Medium
Path Sections 18 Sections
Reward: +20
Once a foothold is gained during an assessment, it may be in scope to move laterally and vertically within a target network. Using one compromised machine to access another is called pivoting and allows us to access networks and resources that are not directly accessible to us through the compromised host. Port forwarding accepts the traffic on a given IP address and port and redirects it to a different IP address and port combination. Tunneling is a technique that allows us to encapsulate traffic within another protocol so that it looks like a benign traffic stream.
Active Directory Enumeration & Attacks
Medium
Path Sections 36 Sections
Reward: +20
Active Directory (AD) is the leading enterprise domain management suite, providing identity and access management, centralized domain administration, authentication, and much more. Due to the many features and complexity of AD, it presents a large attack surface that is difficult to secure properly. To be successful as infosec professionals, we must understand AD architectures and how to secure our enterprise environments. As Penetration testers, having a firm grasp of what tools, techniques, and procedures are available to us for enumerating and attacking AD environments and commonly seen AD misconfigurations is a must.
Using Web Proxies
Easy
Path Sections 15 Sections
Reward: +20
Web application penetration testing frameworks are an essential part of any web penetration test. This module will teach you two of the best frameworks: Burp Suite and OWASP ZAP.
Attacking Web Applications with Ffuf
Easy
Path Sections 13 Sections
Reward: +10
This module covers the fundamental enumeration skills of web fuzzing and directory brute forcing using the Ffuf tool. The techniques learned in this module will help us in locating hidden pages, directories, and parameters when targeting web applications.
Login Brute Forcing
Easy
Path Sections 13 Sections
Reward: +20
The module contains an exploration of brute-forcing techniques, including the use of tools like Hydra and Medusa, and the importance of strong password practices. It covers various attack scenarios, such as targeting SSH, FTP, and web login forms.
SQL Injection Fundamentals
Medium
Path Sections 17 Sections
Reward: +10
Databases are an important part of web application infrastructure and SQL (Structured Query Language) to store, retrieve, and manipulate information stored in them. SQL injection is a code injection technique used to take advantage of coding vulnerabilities and inject SQL queries via an application to bypass authentication, retrieve data from the back-end database, or achieve code execution on the underlying server.
SQLMap Essentials
Easy
Path Sections 11 Sections
Reward: +20
The SQLMap Essentials module will teach you the basics of using SQLMap to discover various types of SQL Injection vulnerabilities, all the way to the advanced enumeration of databases to retrieve all data of interest.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
Easy
Path Sections 10 Sections
Reward: +20
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities are among the most common web application vulnerabilities. An XSS vulnerability may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary JavaScript code within the target's browser and result in complete web application compromise if chained together with other vulnerabilities. This module will teach you how to identify XSS vulnerabilities and exploit them.
File Inclusion
Medium
Path Sections 11 Sections
Reward: +10
File Inclusion is a common web application vulnerability, which can be easily overlooked as part of a web application's functionality.
File Upload Attacks
Medium
Path Sections 11 Sections
Reward: +20
Arbitrary file uploads are among the most critical web vulnerabilities. These flaws enable attackers to upload malicious files, execute arbitrary commands on the back-end server, and even take control over the entire server and all web applications hosted on it and potentially gain access to sensitive data or cause a service disruption.
Command Injections
Medium
Path Sections 12 Sections
Reward: +20
Command injection vulnerabilities can be leveraged to compromise a hosting server and its entire network. This module will teach you how to identify and exploit command injection vulnerabilities and how to use various filter bypassing techniques to avoid security mitigations.
Web Attacks
Medium
Path Sections 18 Sections
Reward: +20
This module covers three common web vulnerabilities, HTTP Verb Tampering, IDOR, and XXE, each of which can have a significant impact on a company's systems. We will cover how to identify, exploit, and prevent each of them through various methods.
Attacking Common Applications
Medium
Path Sections 33 Sections
Reward: +20
Penetration Testers can come across various applications, such as Content Management Systems, custom web applications, internal portals used by developers and sysadmins, and more. It's common to find the same applications across many different environments. While an application may not be vulnerable in one environment, it may be misconfigured or unpatched in the next. It is important as an assessor to have a firm grasp of enumerating and attacking the common applications discussed in this module. This knowledge will help when encountering other types of applications during assessments.
Linux Privilege Escalation
Easy
Path Sections 28 Sections
Reward: +20
Privilege escalation is a crucial phase during any security assessment. During this phase, we attempt to gain access to additional users, hosts, and resources to move closer to the assessment's overall goal. There are many ways to escalate privileges. This module aims to cover the most common methods emphasizing real-world misconfigurations and flaws that we may encounter in a client environment. The techniques covered in this module are not an exhaustive list of all possibilities and aim to avoid extreme "edge-case" tactics that may be seen in a Capture the Flag (CTF) exercise.
Windows Privilege Escalation
Medium
Path Sections 33 Sections
Reward: +20
After gaining a foothold, elevating our privileges will provide more options for persistence and may reveal information stored locally that can further our access in the environment. Enumeration is the key to privilege escalation. When you gain initial shell access to the host, it is important to gain situational awareness and uncover details relating to the OS version, patch level, any installed software, our current privileges, group memberships, and more. Windows presents an enormous attack surface and, being that most companies run Windows hosts in some way, we will more often than not find ourselves gaining access to Windows machines during our assessments. This covers common methods while emphasizing real-world misconfigurations and flaws that we may encounter during an assessment. There are many additional "edge-case" possibilities not covered in this module. We will cover both modern and legacy Windows Server and Desktop versions that may be present in a client environment.
Documentation & Reporting
Easy
Path Sections 8 Sections
Reward: +20
Proper documentation is paramount during any engagement. The end goal of a technical assessment is the report deliverable which will often be presented to a broad audience within the target organization. We must take detailed notes and be very organized in our documentation, which will help us in the event of an incident during the assessment. This will also help ensure that our reports contain enough detail to illustrate the impact of our findings properly.
Attacking Enterprise Networks
Medium
Path Sections 14 Sections
Reward: +20
We often encounter large and complex networks during our assessments. We must be comfortable approaching an internal or external network, regardless of the size, and be able to work through each phase of the penetration testing process to reach our goal. This module will guide students through a simulated penetration testing engagement, from start to finish, with an emphasis on hands-on testing steps that are directly applicable to real-world engagements.