"Interpreter" - HackTheBox Walkthrough (Season 10)

HackTheBox “Interpreter” Writeup

A walkthrough of the HackTheBox Interpreter machine (Season 10) , a Medium rated Linux box. this blog covers initial access, lateral movement, and privesc.

Initial Reconnaissance

Standard nmap scan first, machine IP is 10.129.34.4:

┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~]
└─$ nmap -A -T5 10.129.34.4
Starting Nmap 7.98 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2026-02-22 08:15 -0500
Nmap scan report for 10.129.34.4
Host is up (0.12s latency).
Not shown: 997 closed tcp ports (reset)
PORT    STATE SERVICE  VERSION
22/tcp  open  ssh      OpenSSH 9.2p1 Debian 2+deb12u7 (protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey:
|   256 07:eb:d1:b1:61:9a:6f:38:08:e0:1e:3e:5b:61:03:b9 (ECDSA)
|_  256 fc:d5:7a:ca:8c:4f:c1:bd:c7:2f:3a:ef:e1:5e:99:0f (ED25519)
80/tcp  open  http     Jetty
| http-methods:
|_  Potentially risky methods: TRACE
|_http-title: Mirth Connect Administrator
443/tcp open  ssl/http Jetty
|_http-title: Mirth Connect Administrator
|_ssl-date: TLS randomness does not represent time
| http-methods:
|_  Potentially risky methods: TRACE
| ssl-cert: Subject: commonName=mirth-connect
| Not valid before: 2025-09-19T12:50:05
|_Not valid after:  2075-09-19T12:50:05
Device type: general purpose
Running: Linux 4.X|5.X
OS details: Linux 4.15 - 5.19

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 28.70 seconds

Three open ports, OS is Linux (Debian):

• 22: OpenSSH 9.2p1
• 80: Jetty HTTP (Mirth Connect Admin)
• 443: Jetty HTTPS (Mirth Connect Admin, self-signed cert)

Port 80 just takes us to 443, so lets head there.

Secured

🔒

Active HackTheBox Challenge

This challenge is currently active on HackTheBox. According to HTB's content policy, sharing writeups of active challenges is prohibited.

take a guess at the password, maybe you're right?

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My Views

At the end of the day, Very weird box, Can understand why it only has a 2.6/5 rating on HTB : )