Why Exegol became my stable environment for CTFs, penetration testing labs, and my journey from the eJPT to the CPTS.

Jeeves is a retired medium-difficulty Windows machine and my second box from the CPTS Preparation Track on HackTheBox Labs. The path starts with an unauthenticated Jenkins instance and continues through a KeePass database, Pass-the-Hash and an NTFS Alternate Data Stream.

🕵️ Enumeration

After spawning the machine and connecting to the HTB Labs VPN, I started with a full TCP port and service scan:

🔍 Initial Nmap Scan

nmap -Pn -sT -sC -sV -p- --open --min-rate 1000 -T4 \
  <TARGET_IP> \
  -oA nmap/jeeves-full

The options used here are:

My experience with the eJPT course, its hands-on labs, the certification process, and why I consider it a good starting point for penetration testing.

Fluffy is an Easy-rated Windows machine and my first box from the new CPTS Preparation Track on HackTheBox Labs. It’s a great box if you want to get hands-on with modern Active Directory attacks. We start from an assumed-breach perspective, inject a crafted .library-ms file via an SMB share to harvest NTLM hashes, and continue by abusing Generic Write privileges through Shadow Credentials. The final step to Domain Takeover is exploiting an AD CS vulnerability.

CodePartTwo is an easy difficulty Linux machine featuring a web-based JavaScript editor. The core of this challenge revolves around the “Run Code” functionality - a feature that is inherently dangerous if not properly isolated.

🕵️ Enumeration

After spawning the machine and connecting to the VPN, we start with the initial enumeration.

🔍 Initial Nmap Scan

Like always, we start by running an initial nmap scan to identify open ports: