Of late, I have been working on immersive labs for quite some time, and I’ve managed to complete around 60 odd challenges (With a few more in progress). Since the challenges are not retired, I cannot publish solutions to the challenges on the public internet - hence, I’m creating this index page to list down the interesting challenges I’ve completed.
Each of the entry below has a corresponding blog post that has not been published. I’ll publish it when the challenge gets retired.
Without further ado, here’s the list of challenges:
- Santa’s Sleighdar - An awesome challenge involving reversing python byte code. I completed this relatively quickly, but learnt how to read python byte code.
- Data Compression - We start this challenge by parsing through the history of a PowerShell terminal, and then retrieve the passwords for a compressed file (and retrieve additional data from it)
- Compiled HTML - first time doing this type - this involves analysis of a malicious CHM file to retrieve the infection vector.
- A Christmas Phish - identifying various characteristics of a phishing mail, including reading headers and other associated information.
- Santa’s Naughty List - SQLite command line primer. we are given an SQLite database and we need to use the sqlite3 command line utility to mount and query the database.
- Elf in a Shell(f) - Easy one. Use the command line to navigate to various “famous” folders on a Linux file system. On navigating to 6-7 such folders, you are given the flag.
- Sploit me Challenge - first time I worked on such a challenge. A custom Linux binary was provided - it was vulnerable and had the setuid bit on. The objective of this lab is to read a restricted token (accessible by root only) by running the executable from your local user. Solved this quickly, but the concepts were understood!
- pcap challenge - I loved this one. Especially the part where you had to determine the encryption key of the malware file. You are given a packet capture and asked to determine various things like the host name of the victim machine, compromised website, domain name of the malware hosting site. The last two challenges involve determining the encryption key of an xor encrypted malware, and then decrypting it to determine the md5 hash. I spent a huge amount of time on this - the first step was to understand how to retrieve the xor key, and the second step was to write out a python script to decrypt the executable and generate it’s md5 hash.
- Tracking a LOLBins Campaign: Infection - Packet Analysis primer. This challenge asks you to analyse a packet capture to determine various IOC’s and how a target system was infected and compromised.
- MongoDB Injection - this is work in progress. The challenge involves NoSQL injection to capture the flag
- Malicious OneNote - cracker of a challenge, having around 23 tasks to complete. Learnt quite a bit about parsing onenote files and cyberchef.