Writeup I’m not gonna lie to you, this one had me stumped for quite a few days, but as per the usual with these things the answer was kinda in my face if I just had dug a little deeper. So let’s go ahead and dig into CBC Task 2. Okay, so the disk image we were looking at last task definitely had some malware installed on the “endpoint” and that malware was generating some network traffic.
Hello everyone and welcome to NSA’s Code Breaker Challenge for 2025! NSA CBC is a yearly event put on by the NSA that is for all intents and purposes a CTF. Challenge topics vary from forensics to reverse engineering and they’re always pretty fun and challenging. Starting off this year it looks like we’re given a disk image that we’ve gotta comb through for something suspicious. So, without further adieu, let’s dive into Code Breaker Challenge 2025.

Hack the Box Walkthrough: Sau

- 6 mins read

Series: Intro to Red Team

Hello and once again welcome back to the Intro to Red Team series, we’ll be handling this easy Linux box today. I’ll be going into this blind as always and we’ll see if I get stuck anywhere, so let’s just dive into it and get after it. Our Nmap Scan Alright here we see the results of our classic nmap scan, ports 22 and 55555 open. 55555 isn’t recognized, but we can see form the fingerprint it may be some type of web application let’s go ahead and see.

Hack the Box Walkthrough: Jerry

- 4 mins read

Series: Intro to Red Team

And here we are back to the Intro to Red Team track here on Hack the Box. Today we’ve got an easy Windows box. We’re going to be trying from here on out to do as much in adventure mode as we can, only really switching to guided if we’re really stuck. So without anymore yapping from me, let’s get into todays box. NMAP scan results Looks like we have an Apache Tomcat running on probably Windows Server 2012?

Hack the Box Starting Point: Three

- 5 mins read

Series: Starting Point

Hack the Box Starting Point: Three Hello everyone and welcome back to the HTB Starting Point series I’ve been working on for way too long now. Took a little break for the Thanksgiving weekend, I hope everyone enjoyed themselves. Now however it is time to get back to work and so today we will be working on the next machine here in Tier 1. While we were away it looks like the main HTB platform has undergone some UI changes and so we don’t really get a sneak peak as to what we’ll be doing anymore, which honestly is totally fine, let’s spin up our respective attack machines and get to work!

Hack the Box Walkthrough: Cap

- 7 mins read

Series: Intro to Red Team

HTB Intro to Red Team: Cap Hello again and welcome to the start of a new series I’m working on in preparation for taking the HTB Cetified Penetration Testing Student (CPTS) exam. Hack the Box recently (ish) introduced Tracks to their main platform which are bundles of different boxes that cover similar topics or were from the same event. Now they do have a CPTS prep track, but as I am truthfully not very good at all this yet we are starting with the Intro to Red Team track.

HTB Academy: Windows CMD and Powershell

- 6 mins read
I did say that I needed to work on my Windows sys admin skills and also my PowerShell-fu and so here I am. As per the usual when it comes to my Academy content, I will just be covering the skill assessment part of the module. It was a good module though, covered a lot of content as you get some hands on with both CMD and PowerShell and both are important.

Hack the Box Starting Point: Crocodile

- 6 mins read

Series: Starting Point

Time for our next Tier 1 box, Crocodile looks like it will be covering a few of the different tools we’ve been getting familiar with rather than introducing any new ones. Scrolling through the questions I see some FTP, gobuster, nmap, php, you know, fun stuff. Anyhow of you’re not familiar with any of this I implore you to go back and look through some of my other posts, otherwise fire up your attack environments and let’s go huntin for gators.

Hack the Box Starting Point: Responder

- 7 mins read

Series: Starting Point

Responder Hello and welcome back to the little Starting Point series I’ve been doing on the HacktheBox main platform. Today we’re going to be looking at the Responder box which definitely looks interesting. Just peaking at the questions ahead of us we’re going to be dealing with some stuff that I haven’t touched too mouch. Yeah we have some web stuff, but it looks like it may be hosted on a Windows server?

HTB Starting Point: Appointment

- 4 mins read

Series: Starting Point

HTB Starting Point: Appointment Hello and welcome to Starting Point Tier 1! We are officially out of tier zero and are now actually working towards a little bit of actual exploitation! Todays box, Appointment, is going to be covering some of the fundamentals of SQL injection. SQL stands for structured query language and we briefly touched on it during the Mongod box. SQL in it’s normal use is a query language (obviously) that allows us to interact with databases.