Tactics Walkthrough | HackTheBox

This is a simple walkthrough for completing the Tactics target machine in Hackthebox.com.

Task 1

Question: Which Nmap switch can we use to enumerate machines when our packets are otherwise blocked by the Windows firewall?

Answer: -Pn

Task 2

Question: What does the 3-letter acronym SMB stand for?

Answer: Server Message Block

Task 3

Question: What port does SMB use to operate at?

Answer: 445

Task 4

Question: What command line argument do you give to `smbclient` to list available shares?

Answer: -L

Task 5

Question: What character at the end of a share name indicates it’s an administrative share?

Answer: $

Task 6

Question: Which Administrative share is accessible on the box that allows users to view the whole file system?

Answer: C$

Task 7

Question: What command can we use to download the files we find on the SMB Share?

Answer: get

Task 8

Question: Which tool that is part of the Impacket collection can be used to get an interactive shell on the system?

Answer: psexec.py

Task 9

Submit flag

We know from task 6 above that we are able to access the target via smbclient on the administrator account with no password. From here, we tried to access all three shares (ADMIN$, C$, and IPC$) and were able to view the files inside C$ using the dir command.

If we type help, we can see a list of more actions we can use to navigate around. We can navigate around using the cd command. Fast forward looking around directories, we can find the flag.txt file in the administrators desktop. Using the get command, it will download the file to our home folder.

Mission accomplished.