One of our largest and strategic customer recently requested to be able to execute an automated ETL pipeline from one of their Windows multinode cluster in a sequential manner.
During a debugging session of one of our NodeJS microservices misbehaving on a Windows Server 2019 instances, I opened the microservice log to begin investigating the faulty behavior.
Hack The Box is a website offering vulnerable machines for practising hacking skills. The goal of the ‘Labs’ are to hack into the system and capture the flag (CTF) which can be found in a text file in the desktop of a regular and an administrator user. On my pursuit to get some practical exercise in the field, I decided to sign up and attempt one of the beginner exercises. This post describes how I managed to get remote code execution (RCE) in the one of the boxes and access the flags.