TheNotebook Writeup

Introduction :

TheNotebook is a medium Linux box released back in March 2021.

Part 1 : Initial Enumeration

As always we begin our Enumeration using Nmap to enumerate opened ports. We will be using the flags -sC for default scripts and -sV to enumerate versions.

[ 10.10.14.34/23 ] [ /dev/pts/12 ] [~/HTB/TheNotebook]
→ nmap -vvv -p- 10.129.188.119 --max-retries 0 -Pn --min-rate=500 2>/dev/null | grep Discovered
Discovered open port 80/tcp on 10.129.188.119
Discovered open port 22/tcp on 10.129.188.119

[ 10.10.14.34/23 ] [ /dev/pts/12 ] [~/HTB/TheNotebook]
→ nmap -sCV -p 80,22 10.129.188.119
Starting Nmap 7.91 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2021-08-14 10:05 CEST
Nmap scan report for 10.129.188.119
Host is up (0.027s latency).

PORT   STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open  ssh     OpenSSH 7.6p1 Ubuntu 4ubuntu0.3 (Ubuntu Linux; protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey:
|   2048 86:df:10:fd:27:a3:fb:d8:36:a7:ed:90:95:33:f5:bf (RSA)
|   256 e7:81:d6:6c:df:ce:b7:30:03:91:5c:b5:13:42:06:44 (ECDSA)
|_  256 c6:06:34:c7:fc:00:c4:62:06:c2:36:0e:ee:5e:bf:6b (ED25519)
80/tcp open  http    nginx 1.14.0 (Ubuntu)
|_http-server-header: nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)
|_http-title: The Notebook - Your Note Keeper
Service Info: OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel

Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at https://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 7.85 seconds

Part 2 : Getting User Access

Our nmap scan picked up port 80 so let's investigate it:

We can register an account and login:

Once that's done we can create a test note:

So here we're able to create notes and view them, but that's not really useful for us. The trick was to take a look into the cookie storage tab in F12, where we would see our auth token:

We can inspect it using jwt.io

Here we see that there is a Key ID field, pointing to the box's local address on port 7070:

[ 10.10.14.34/23 ] [ /dev/pts/12 ] [~/HTB/TheNotebook]
→ nmap -sCV -p 7070 10.129.188.119
Starting Nmap 7.91 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2021-08-14 10:20 CEST
Nmap scan report for 10.129.188.119
Host is up (0.026s latency).

PORT     STATE  SERVICE    VERSION
7070/tcp closed realserver

It's not available to us, which probably means that it only accepts packets coming from localhost, so we might need to port forward it once we get access to the box later on.

Part 3 : Getting Root Access

the text goes here

Conclusion

Here we can see the progress graph :

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