Penetration Testing - Hack The Box: Guardian
Executed initial reconnaissance, target enumeration, and exploited IDOR/XSS vectors to compromise internal accounts and achieve full machine takeover.
Chained multiple web vulnerabilities: leveraging IDOR to extract Gitea credentials, XSS for session hijacking (CVE-2025-22131), and CSRF paired with RFI to deploy an interactive reverse shell.
Extracted hardcoded MySQL credentials from an internal Gitea repository to authenticate and establish an SSH session as a privileged user.
Exploited misconfigured sudo/user permissions and an execution flaw in safeapache2ctl to escalate privileges directly to root.