HTB Connected Writeup | Hack The Box Connected Walkthrough

Machine profile

Platform

Hack The Box

Machine

Connected

Difficulty

Easy

Published

2026-09-25

Status

active

Connected is an easy-difficulty Linux machine from Hack The Box with a business phone system at its centre. The theme is ordinary corporate IT: a telephony platform, a web front end, and the maintenance features that vendors ship and operators rarely think about.

The skills it covers sit in the "classic web application security" bucket — injection flaws in a login form, upload handling, configuration and backup file exposure, and the Linux privilege escalation patterns that come from scheduled jobs and permissive service accounts. None of it requires exotic tooling or a novel vulnerability; the difficulty is in noticing what is exposed and in turning one small finding into the next.

It suits readers who are finishing guided material and want a first machine where every step is observable and the escalation is a realistic misconfiguration rather than memory corruption. It is also a good introduction to VoIP and PBX platforms, which come up surprisingly often in real small-business environments and are rarely covered in tutorials.

What this machine covers

What the finished writeup contains

When Connected retires, the complete walkthrough publishes here unchanged — every command, output and screenshot from the actual box, in the order it was solved.

1. Reconnaissance Port scanning, service fingerprinting and attack-surface mapping
2. Initial foothold The first authenticated or unauthenticated execution path
3. Enumeration Deeper inspection of the exposed services and their configuration
4. Exploitation Chaining the weaknesses found into a working exploit
5. Credential recovery Secrets, keys and hashes, and how they were obtained
6. Privilege escalation The route from the foothold account to a root shell
7. Flags User and root flag capture