And So It Begins - Practical Recon | Meow: HTB

In our last post we talked about the 5 phases of ethical hacking. Today we are going to go over a reconnaissance tool called Nmap. Now we could go into OSINT but if you want to learn about that go to Heath Adam’s PNPT and you can get a solid understanding from his course.

For us we will go over a practical application of Nmap using the platform Hack The Box.

Don’t worry we won’t do something too difficult (not like I have the skills to do anything crazy anyway) so you will be fine. We will be using the meow machine to play with nmap.

Now, Lets run an Nmap scan against the target machine. First launch your terminal… duh.

We use the command nmap -vvv <target machine> see below.

Verbose nmap scan

I like to use -vvv for the highest levels of verbosity and increased speed.

we can use another switch “-p” to designate specific ports but for now we don’t need that.

Now as a reward of our nmap scan we have port 23 open which runs telnet. Telnet is an application protocol that operates in plain text and allows users to remotely log into other computers.

Now we can run another nmap scan with the switch “-A” and specify the port we received like so.

nmap -A -p23 <target machine> -T4

-A = OS and version detection, script scanning and traceroute

-T4 = is for timing and faster execution

We run a second scan to see if we can get any more information from the port
Below is the output from our scan. Interestingly, we now know the host we are targeting is a linux machine.

I was going to stop here and show only the nmap scan but since it is a super easy box to break into I may as well finish it with you. Not gonna lie I’d rather stop doing this at the moment and finish my movie.

since the scan came back as Telnet we can use the command “telnet -l root <target machine>

when we run this command we get logged in directly to the host and can list the files. listing the files provides the following. You need to read the file yourself.

How do you read a file? I’m NOT doing it for you.

Hope you learned something. If you didn’t that’s cool. Thanks for giving this a read.

As always. Stay Curious.