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I finished a tiered hacking exercise, and after submitting it was told that the last tier (a machine on the network) was not possible to attack in the given exercise.

The machine was only running rpc.statd on 111 and had a status service listed when I checked rpcinfo.

The box is static (as in, no incoming/outgoing connections exist or will exist)

As a new penetration tester who is up and coming, what do you do when faced with a situation like this? Of course giving up is the last thing you do, but in this specific scenario, is there a feasible solution or is it just a brick wall intended to teach me a lesson?

Thanks.

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See Kobayashi Maru ? : ) – BrianAdkins Feb 25 at 4:44
I see. So I must be like Kirk and rewrite the VM lab to introduce a vulnerability that allows me to succeed?..So I don't attack the other machine on the VM network, but I attack the hyperviser and modify the virtual environment... – Andrew Feb 25 at 5:18
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From the given information, it is unlikely that there is a vulnerability in the system as it has a very limited surface for potential attacks. – Terry Chia Feb 25 at 11:38

1 Answer

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The procedure when you are pentesting looking for open ports is always the same:

1º Run a port scanner

2º Check ports and services running

3º Find (or write your own) exploits for known vulnerabilities.

4º Report

In this case of RPC, as far as I know it isn't a big deal now. In the 90's it was very popular, but right now I haven't seen any vulnerability related with it.

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