Netmon

Platform: HackTheBox | Difficulty: Easy | OS: N/A Author: D3v0o0Nu11 | Date: 2026-02-10 | Status: Solved

Summary

Walkthrough of the HackTheBox machine Netmon. Foothold via smb; direct root access from the foothold. Both flags captured and redacted.

Recon

Port scan

 bash read-only • copy allowed Copy
nmap -sVC -p- <IP> -oA nmap/Netmon

Enumeration highlights

Foothold

Vulnerability / Misconfiguration

1. First, let's do nmap.

2. Based from the result here, we know that anonymous ftp login allowed and the machine seems running a web service at port 5985. Not only that there's SMB ports open.

3. And it seems there's a vuln with the smb service.

4. Anyway let's login with ftp.

5. Notice there's user.txt file, let's download that.

Proof

User flag: REDACTED

Privilege Escalation

User -> Root/Admin

The exploit provided a shell running with elevated privileges directly, so no separate privilege escalation was required.

Root flag: REDACTED

Flags

Lessons Learned

1. Enumerate everything; version strings map to CVEs.
2. Confirm each hypothesis with a test before building the exploit.
3. Chain foothold -> privilege escalation mechanically.