Penetration Test Assessment

A penetration test assessment was a requirement of a short cource on Penetration Testing from the Charles Sturt University. As part of the assessment, students were provided an ova image of a virtual machine. The virtual machine was to be the target of a penetration test, and students were expected to obtain flags for submission. A walkthrough of the assessment is presented here.

For the benefit of other students, the names and values of the flags have been redacted, and replaced with the string REDACTED

Often times, I employ a CentOS VirtualBox virtual machine (VM) as a development, testing and staging environment, I love the flexibility of virtual environments for testing and development work before moving my work to production environments.

Recently I ran a yum update and yum upgrade on a CentOS 6.4 VM and subsequently rebooted it, only to be greeted by a blank screen following bootup. A quick search of virtual TTY terminals yielded a login prompt.