Agent P - Writeup

The write-up details a comprehensive penetration test against an environment named "Agent P," which appears to be a simulated corporate network or lab setup designed for ethical hacking training. The tester's journey through the system reveals several security vulnerabilities that were exploited to escalate privileges from low-privileged user accounts to root access. Here’s a summary of the key steps and lessons learned:

Initial Access

1. WordPress Admin Exploitation:

   • The attacker gained initial access by exploiting the WordPress admin panel, specifically targeting the theme editor.
   • This allowed PHP execution as www-data, which is a low-privileged web server user.

2. Credential Harvesting:

   • By accessing the wp-config.php file, the attacker obtained MariaDB credentials.
   • Using these credentials, they accessed the database and retrieved SSH credentials for a user named "norm."

Privilege Escalation

1. SSH Access as Norm:

   • The attacker used the harvested SSH credentials to log in as the norm user.
   • Upon logging in, the /root/flag.txt file was found but could not be read due to insufficient permissions.

2. World-Readable Configuration File Exploitation:

Read the full article at InfoSec Write-ups - Medium

---

Want to create content about this topic? Use Nemati AI tools to generate articles, social posts, and more.