Raven 2 - VulnHub Writeup

PHPMailer RCE (CVE-2016-10033) and MySQL UDF Privilege Escalation.

🖥️ Challenge / Machine Info

  • Platform: vulnhub
  • Name / Title: raven2
  • Difficulty: Hard
  • Target OS / Environment: Linux
  • Key Vulnerability Focus: PHPMailer RCE / MySQL UDF

Walkthrough

  1. Foothold: Exploit PHPMailer RCE (CVE-2016-10033) to write a backdoor shell in the web folder.
  2. Privilege Escalation: The MySQL database runs as root and allows writing plugins. Write a custom User Defined Function (UDF) library and execute system commands as root.