As always in every penetration testing engagements we start by reconnaissance and information gathering, in this step we try to get as much information about the target as possible.

We can achieve that by using various of tools and techniques to obtain foothold on the target, by using enumeration, scanning and other recon techniques.

In this lab we are tasked to pentest this Linux Lab : Extplorer on Offsec’s Proving grounds :

First step will be to check if the target is up and running, we could do so by sending ICMP requests to check if we can communicate with the target by running this command :

ping 192.168.243.16

We can see from the screenshot above that the target is up and running, next I’ll run Rustscan to quickly check for open ports that will check which services and ports are running on the target system:

I’ll run the following command:

┌──(root💀CSEC)-[/home/cyborgbytes/Documents/PGWriteupsOffsec/Extplorer]
└─# rustscan -a 192.168.243.16 --ulimit 5000

The output is as shown in this screenshot: