Hack the Box — Meow (telnet)

I will cover solution steps of the “Meow” machine, which is part of the ‘Starting Point’ labs and has a difficulty rating of ‘Very Easy’.

Login to Hack the Box portal and navigate to Starting Point’s page, where you will be prompted to choose between a PWNBOX or an OVPN (i.e. OpenVPN) connection. A PWNBOX is a pre-configured, browser-based virtual machine and requires a HackTheBox VIP+ membership for unlimited access. I have used the OVPN method and Kali Linux through VMWare Workstation for this challenge.

Download the VPN (.ovpn) configuration file and open a terminal window and run below mentioned command.

sudo openvpn [path/to/filename].ovpn

Note: [filename] should be replaced with the name of your downloaded .ovpn file for the Starting Point lab.

You will see the Initialization Sequence Completed line at the end, which confirms we have now connected to the Meow machine.

Refresh the page in browser to see the new connection and then we can activate the machine by clicking the ‘Spawn Machine’ button. The machine is now active and showing a target IP address.

TASK 1: What does the acronym VM stand for?: Virtual Machine

TASK 2: What tool do we use to interact with the operating system in order to issue commands via the command line, such as the one to start our VPN connection? It’s also known as a console or shell: Terminal

Task 3: What service do we use to form our VPN connection into HTB labs? : openvpn

Task4: What tool do we use to test our connection to the target with an ICMP echo request?: ping

Task5: What is the name of the most common tool for finding open ports on a target? : nmap

TASK 6: What service do we identify on port 23/tcp during our scans? : telnet

TASK 7: What username is able to log into the target over telnet with a blank password? root

Submit Flag:

To find the flag we’d run an nmap scan:

nmap -p- <IP> 
nmap -p- 10.129.77.62 
or 
nmap -v 10.129.77.62

We’d find port 23 open and now we’ll try to connect to telnet using below command:

telnet <IP> 
telnet 10.129.77.62

It asks for Meow Login. Let’s try:

username:root 
password: [just enter without entering any password]

Lastly run the below commands to check for existing files and to check its contents.

ls -al 
cat flag.txt

You will receive message as “Meow has been Pwned” and Challenge solved successfully.

Dear Reader feel free to reach out for queries and feedback.🥷