Hack The Box: MEOW Writeup

Hack The Box MEOW Writeup

The Meow machine is the very first challenge in Tier 0 of Hack The Box’s Starting Point series.

To get started with the Meow machine on Hack The Box, you just need to hit the “Spawn Machine” button. This will boot up the target system.

Start machine

Once the target machine is up and running, the next step is to ensure we have a working connection to it. We can do this by pinging the target IP from our attack machine. This simple check confirms whether our machine can communicate with the target. In my case ping is successful so the connection is established.

Checking Connection

Let’s start with a nmap scan. Use following command to scan the target IP address.

nmap -A 10.129.76.113

The above command initiates an aggressive scan of the target IP. In this scan, Nmap performs several actions:

• OS detection: Attempts to identify the operating system running on the target machine.
• Version detection: Determines the software versions of services running on open ports.
• Script scanning: Runs Nmap’s default scripts to gather additional information about vulnerabilities or configurations.
• Traceroute: Maps out the network path to the target.

nmap scan results

The scan results reveal that the target system is running a Telnet service on port 23 and uses a Linux-based OS. Let’s try to connect to the Telnet service using the following command:

telnet 10.129.76.113

establishing connection with target machine through telnet

It asks for username to login, let’s try root as username and the connection is successfully established.

connection established through telnet

Now that we have established the connection, let’s check which files are available using the ls command. BOOM! We found our desired flag.txt. To capture the flag, we can use the cat command to display its contents.

capturing flag

Submit the captured flag and answer the questions on the box page. Since the questions are straightforward and we’ve already covered everything in the previous steps, there’s no need to provide detailed responses here. Simply refer back to our earlier findings, to complete the challenge successfully.

Answered questions on box page

CONGRATULATIONS!!! The MEOW box is completed!

This walkthrough finishes here. Stay tuned for the next adventure! 🚀😊

Here is the link to the walkthrough for the second challenge in Tier 0 of Hack The Box:

Hack The Box: FAWN Writeup