Forest Hackthebox Walkthrough Best -

Running whoami /groups reveals a shocking privilege:

SeBackupPrivilege        Enabled
SeRestorePrivilege       Enabled

This is game over for the domain controller.
SeBackupPrivilege allows reading any file on the system, including the NTDS.dit (the AD database). forest hackthebox walkthrough best

Gaining the initial shell often leads to a moment of pause. The user is on the box, but how do they escalate? The best walkthroughs highlight the methodology here: This is game over for the domain controller

Forest teaches the concept of "Tiered Administration" violations. A standard user should never have replication rights on a Domain Controller. Exploiting this via secretsdump.py or Mimikatz allows the attacker to simulate a Domain Controller and dump the NTLM hashes of all users—including the Administrator. User flag obtained.

Since port 5985 is open, use evil-winrm:

evil-winrm -i 10.10.10.161 -u svc-alfresco -p s3rvice

We are now in a limited shell. Navigate to the desktop:

cd C:\Users\svc-alfresco\Desktop
type user.txt

User flag obtained.