Altered
Overview Altered is a Hard-rated Linux machine built for a UHC (Ultimate Hacking Championship) event. Machine author: ghost-2. Operating system: Ubuntu 20.04 Focal. IP: 10.10.10.x. A Laravel staff dashboard leaks valid usernames through its login errors. The password reset issues a four-digit PIN and throttles by client IP, but the app trusts X-Forwarded-For from any client, so pairing every PIN guess with a fresh spoofed IP defeats the limiter and recovers the PIN. An authenticated API endpoint guards its records with an MD5-looking secret compared using PHP’s loose ==, so sending the secret as the boolean true bypasses the check - and because the id field also accepts a string, it opens a UNION-based SQL injection. The database account holds FILE, so INTO OUTFILE writes a PHP webshell into the web root for a shell as www-data. The kernel is 5.16.0 from January 2022, vulnerable to Dirty Pipe (CVE-2022-0847); a SUID binary overwrite (or an /etc/passwd edit past a pam_wordle gimmick) gives root. ...