All Articles & Walkthroughs

Legacy is a Windows XP machine on HackTheBox designed to be exploited using the well-known MS17-010 and MS08-067 vulnerabilities.

Lame is a Linux machine with several open ports for FTP (vsFTPd), SSH (OpenSSH), and NetBIOS/Samba (smbd) services. This machine highlights that even though the service has known vulnerabilities, that does not mean it can be exploited. Enumeration is key to find a vulnerability that can be exploited.

File upload features such as profile pictures, document submissions and image galleries are common in modern web applications. They also carry a dangerous threat to the application and server. When the application fully trusts and accepts the file uploads from a user and writes them to a directory, a single misstep can allow an attacker to execute code on the server infrastructure. This article discusses how an attacker can bypass frontend MIME type and extension checks, how polygot files trick image parsers and how to mitigate the file upload vulnerability by isolating the file upload pipeline.

A critical failure of a production workload can carry a significant impact on a company, and it matters how soon the administrator or developers get notified. Even though Google Cloud offers powerful monitoring and alerting capabilities, sometimes projects require more than a standard email notification. Custom alert formatting, application-specific filtering, integration with external platforms, and automated responses all require additional processing logic. <br/><br/> Silent Watcher is a serverless, event-driven production alerting pipeline built using Google Cloud services. It monitors error logs generated by a production Compute Engine VM, filters them using Cloud Logging, routes relevant events through Pub/Sub, and triggers an ephemeral Cloud Run Function to process and deliver the alert to an external communication platform such as Discord or Slack.

Insecure Direct Object Reference(IDOR) vulnerability arises when the application allows users to access or modify objects that they are not authorized to do so. To exploit the IDOR vulnerability, it does not require an experienced hacker with custom malware or a terminal wizard, it usually just needs a curious user changing a single digit in a URL parameter in their web browser's address bar.

Building a secure deployment pipeline is often seen by the developers as a hassle and an expensive process. In reality, many developers and small teams use unsafe methods such as copying files over SSH, by exposing port 22 to the internet or storing long-lived credentials in build pipelines. While these approaches are convenient, they introduce unnecessary security risks that can compromise production environments. <br><br/> This article leverages Google Cloud's FREE tier and BitBucket, Cloudflare FREE accounts to build Zero-Trust Zero-Cost Production Deployment Architecture.