HellBoundHackers Basic Web Hacking Challenge 4

HellBoundHackers, or simply HBH, is a very famous and well-known security challenge based website. It contains challenges from several different cybersecurity fields.

I’ve decided to have a bit of fun and try to solve every single challenge presented, from the easiest to the hardest. (although easy and hard will be different depending on your skillset and field of expertise).

As I do with any challenge website, I WILL NEVER post the flag in cleartext, as it kills the fun and thrill of finding it, however I will post my way (or ways) of getting there. This is done in respect of the website’s security and non-disclosure policy, even when it doesn’t have one ;).

Web Hacking Challenge 4

This time the author only provides us with a simple instruction, followed by a password field and submit button. The instruction is:

ERROR: htpasswd.php file not found in basic4/

The first thing that crossed my mind is, if the htpasswd.php is not found, maybe the application will let us pass without a password. I’ve tried to just click submit without a password, and I got a “Invalid Password” error, so this means that we probably have to find the htpasswd.php, or another way to do it. Using our beloved Google Chrome Dev Tolls (F12) we can inspect the code of this form, to find that a file called “17.php” is receiving the HTTP Post request for the username and password, checking on the “htpasswd.php” that contains the password, fand when the password is wrong, we receive a “Invalid Password” message:

OK, so let us try to find the same “htpasswd.php” in another directory, as the message clearly say it is not found in “basic4/” directory. After going through all “basic” directories (basic1/htpasswd, basic2/htpasswd.php) I finally found the password at “basic5/htpasswd.php“. And there we have it! I hope you liked this one, see you on the next challenge!

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