Overview
HackTheBox (HTB) provides a weekly rotation of live boxes to solve. These machines can either be created by the HTB team or user submitted. Usually these boxes showcase a new vulnerablity or a vulnerablity exploited in a new or unexpected way. In addition, HTB offers a subscription to access their retired machines.
HTB provides a box difficulty rating matrix, 'Easy', 'Medium', 'Hard', and 'Insane'. In my experience, 'Easy' rated boxes usually focus on a public vulnerablity or simple misconfig that grants a foothold, and sometimes you land as root, bypassing the need for privilege escalation. 'Intermediate', however, requires more research, testing, and once you have a foothold, further enumeration of the box itself to either PrivEsc laterally or vertically to obtain root.txt. 'Hard' and 'Insane' will test your limits as pentester. These are brutal.
To the side, you will see all boxes I have completed on HTB, sorted into Linux and Windows. As always, for anyone who finds this site, it is paramount to first try to solve the box before looking at walkthroughs or hints, but my writeups can serve as just one example on how to exploit these boxes. If they are any inconsistencies or mistakes, please let me know.
Happy Hacking!