Learn Penetration Testing When a Corona Virus Outbreak Attacks

3 min readMar 23, 2020

hello good people when the corona virus spreads and has taken many victims we must continue to learn because by learning we can stay at home to anticipate the spread of the corona virus and try to maintain our health may God always take care of us in all conditions, on this occasion we will learn about Penetration testing for beginners.

Today we are going to take another CTF challenge known as Basic Penetration. The credit for making this VM machine goes to “Josiah Pierce” and it is another boot2root challenge where we have to root the server to complete the challenge. You can download this VM here.

Scanning

Let’s start off by scanning the network and identifying the host IP address. We can identify our host IP as 192.168.1.19 by using Netdiscover.

Scanning Port With Nmap

Then we used Nmap for port enumeration. We find that port 21(ftp), 22(ssh) and 80 are open on the target.

Exploit ProFTPD version 1.3.3c

Based on nmap result, this server using ProFTPD version 1.3.3c which is vulnerable to backdoor command execution. You can find by googling or using searchsploit for more information.

Go to /etc directory and cat passwd file

tarararara……..

Accessing SSH

After I got root by exploiting ProFTPD, I try to find another way to get in the box. Based on nmap result, there is SSH service running on this box. So, I think I can use this way to login as another user.

username : marlinspike

password : marlinspike