Mustacchio is a fun boot to root Linux box. We’ll start with some enumeration on a HTTP service and find credentials for the admin panel in a SQLite database backup. Once we’re in, it quickly becomes apparent we’ll want to test for XXE after more enumeration. With XXE confirmed, we can then exfiltrate the private key of a user on the box and use that to gain SSH access. Finally we’ll escalate privileges by performing a path injection attack on a root-owned SUID binary.

Battery is a medium difficulty Linux box that touches on several techniques. We’ll start with fuzzing a webapp and reverse engineering an executable we find on the target as part of our enumeration stage. Then we’ll move on to exploiting a null byte injection vulnerability in the very old version of PHP to gain access to the webapp as an admin user. Once inside we’ll find an XXE bug that will allow us to enumerate files on the target and leak SSH credentials for an unprivileged user. Finally we’ll walk through 2 different privilege escalation techniques to get a root shell and capture the flag!