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NICE Challenge 1

Summary of Today’s Challenge

I began my work, on 16-Jan-2022, by accessing my security-desk, and remoting into web-dev via ssh to 172.16.20.11. Immediately I made a backup of the docker container running wordpress with the following:

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$ docker save wordpress -o ~/wp-backup.tar 

I then navigated into /etc/apache2/sites-enabled on the devweb server, and removed symlinks by removing osticket.conf with command:

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$ sudo rm osticket.conf

Then I restarted apache2 by the following:

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$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I was then able to access the wordpress admin panel at devweb.daswebs.com/wp-login. Once logged into the wordpress panel, I, was then able to update wordpress from 5.5.1 to 5.8.3 from the dashboard. Then I navigated to the plugins panel, and installed the Stop User Enumeration plugin.


At this point I moved onto setting up the pfsense firewall by navigating to http://172.31.2.2, and removing the snort addon from system > package manager > installed packages. I then re-added the snort addon, and reinstalled the openvm tools.


After completing the above task I moved onto nessus ssh problems by connecting through ssh into the backup server located at 172.16.30.79. Then I opened up the /etc/ssh/ssh_config and /etc/ssh/sshd_config and removed the weak encryption outlined in the nessus report. To get this working, I restarted the ssh services by using the following commands:

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$ sudo systemctl ssh.service restart 

$ sudo systemctl sshd.service restart

Observing my pcap with wireshark showed a lot of traffic on the internal network with attention specific to port 22. I setup a snort rule in pfsense to alert about this activity as follows:

alert tcp $EXTERNAL_NET any -> $HOME_NET 22 (msg: “SSH Detected”; sid:10; rev:1;)

This did not work: mission critical


Each NICE Challenge has the following core elements: a narrative-driven scenario, a business environment (workspace), and a set of technical objectives and/or a written deliverable. Each of these elements is developed to immerse the player (student) in a real-world experience and create a valuable set of data allowing their curator (educator) to judge their readiness for the workforce.

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