THM: Watcher is a boot to root that’s broken down into a series of several mini flags. We’ll start with exploiting an LFI vulnerability to leak credentials for FTP, and then we will upload a shell and launch it with the LFI. Once on the box we’ll privesc through a series of low privilege users before ultimately getting root. This box doesn’t require any advanced techniques, just lots of enumeration.

THM: Startup is an easy Linux box that’s good for practicing enumeration. We will be pentesting the systems of Spice Hut, a spicy new food startup company. It starts off with a misconfigured FTP service that allows anonymous read access as well as write access in a specific directory. We will abuse this to upload some PHP shell code that we can execute through the HTTP service to get our initial foothold. Once on the box, a bit of enumeration reveals a PCAP file labeled as a suspicious incident. After combing through this file we’ll find the password for an unprivileged user. From there, privesc is a straightforward manipulation of a shell script being executed by root on a cronjob.

Anonymous is a simple and straightforward Linux box where we’ll take advantage of a misconfigured FTP service to get a shell. From there we’ll escalate our privileges through another misconfiguration, this time through a root-owned binary with SUID permissions.