The manufacturer's manual
The IP camera at the warehouse entrance has a web management panel. The manufacturer publishes manuals for all its models, and you have a folder full of them in ~/docs. Can you get in without guessing anything?
Lab 3 of 7 in the Web Exploitation path. If you get stuck you have 3 hints, from the vaguest to the most precise: they cost 0, 40 and 120 XP.
What you learn
Objectives complete themselves while you work in the terminal; each one is worth experience points:
- Work out which camera model it is (headers) (100 XP)
- Search the manuals with grep (100 XP)
- Log into the panel with the factory credentials (200 XP)
Topics: web, default-credentials, owasp-a07.
Commands you will use
The terminal is simulated and understands about forty Linux commands. In this lab you will mostly need these:
curl: makes HTTP requests from the terminal and shows the server’s raw answer, headers included.grep: finds the lines that contain a word, even across whole folders with -r. It is the main tool for analysing text and logs.
The simulated environment
The target is an invented host on a simulated private network: you can only reach it from the game terminal.
The target exposes these services:
- Web (HTTP): a web server with pages, APIs or admin panels: the most exposed part of almost every organisation.
- RTSP: the video stream of network cameras and video recorders.
The defensive lesson
Once the lab is solved, the write-up explains what went wrong and how to protect yourself:
Factory credentials are written in public manuals: anyone can read them in two minutes and try them on every device they find online. It is one of the most common ways into cameras, routers and printers (OWASP A07, Identification and Authentication Failures). Defensive lesson: change default credentials right away, keep an inventory of network devices and do not leave management panels reachable by everyone, only from an administration network.
Before and after this lab
To unlock it you must have solved:
- robots.txt and forgotten folders (Web Exploitation, easy)
- Searching text (Linux Fundamentals, medium)
After this lab you can move on to:
- Error messages that talk too much (Web Exploitation, medium)
The Web Exploitation path
Web Exploitation brings the basics into the world of websites and web applications, where a huge share of real attacks happen. You explore invented sites with HTTP requests from the terminal and discover folders someone hoped to hide, cookies the server trusts too much, factory credentials never changed, comments forgotten in the page source and error messages that say too much. The lessons follow the OWASP Top 10 categories, such as Broken Access Control and authentication failures, and each one explains the fix.