SSH for Windows: plink.exe
Notes from completing this module on Hack The Box Academy (Tier II)
When to use?
When our attacker system is a Windows server and we need a SSH client.
Scenario
Plink acts like an SSH client for Windows. Plink is mostly used on old Windows system since no SSH client were installed on Windows systems years back then. Plink comes with the PuTTY package. It is possible to download the PuTTY and Plink binaries here.
In this section Hack the Box proposed the following scenario where our attacker machine is a Windows system.
I used my Windows Server 2019 to replicate the scenario and connect to the HTB network with OpenVPN for Windows. I also had to install the plink
binary and the tool Proxifier
on my Windows VM. I could found licenses products for Proxifier here.
I used the following command to create a SSH session between my Windows attacker box and the pivot Ubuntu server. The plink utility works as a SOCKS proxy server and listen on port 9050.
The tool Proxifier can be compared to proxychains on Linux system. It creates a SOCKS tunnel to SSH and redirect all traffic to our local port 9050.
With our proxy configured, we could start a RDP session with the Windows target (172.16.5.19).
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