HackTheBox Guardian Writeup
A walkthrough of the HackTheBox 'Guardian' machine which is Hard rated linux box. This write-up covers initial access, privilege escalation, and post-exploitation techniques.
RECONNAISSANCE
NMAP
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┌──(dollarboysushil㉿kali)-[~/Documents/HTB_BOXES/guardian]
└─$ nmap -sC -sV 10.129.196.147
Starting Nmap 7.95 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2025-08-31 03:41 EDT
Nmap scan report for 10.129.196.147
Host is up (0.34s latency).
Not shown: 998 closed tcp ports (reset)
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open ssh OpenSSH 8.9p1 Ubuntu 3ubuntu0.13 (Ubuntu Linux; protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey:
| 256 9c:69:53:e1:38:3b:de:cd:42:0a:c8:6b:f8:95:b3:62 (ECDSA)
|_ 256 3c:aa:b9:be:17:2d:5e:99:cc:ff:e1:91:90:38:b7:39 (ED25519)
80/tcp open http Apache httpd 2.4.52
|_http-title: Did not follow redirect to http://guardian.htb/
|_http-server-header: Apache/2.4.52 (Ubuntu)
Service Info: Host: _default_; OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel
Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at https://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 17.84 seconds
Secured
Active HackTheBox Challenge
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This writeup will be made publicly available once the challenge is retired.
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CC BY 4.0
by the author.