Hack The Box — Valentine Writeup w/o Metasploit

This is the 8th blog out of a series of blogs I will be publishing on retired HTB machines in preparation for the OSCP. The full list of OSCP like machines compiled by TJnull can be found here.

Let’s get started!

Reconnaissance

First thing first, we run a quick initial nmap scan to see which ports are open and which services are running on those ports.

nmap -sC -sV -O -oA htb/valentine/nmap/initial 10.10.10.79

• -sC: run default nmap scripts
• -sV: detect service version
• -O: detect OS
• -oA: output all formats and store in file nmap/initial

We get back the following result showing that three ports are open:

• Port 22: running OpenSSH 5.9p1
• Ports 80 & 443: running Apache httpd 2.2.22

Before we start investigating these ports, let’s run more comprehensive nmap scans in the background to make sure we cover all bases.

Let’s run an nmap scan that covers all ports.