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Cron Troubleshooting Scenarios

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Cron

Cron job scenarios
# Name Level Time Type
1 "Amsterdam": Cron Hijack Medium 15 m Hack
"Amsterdam": Cron Hijack

Scenario: "Amsterdam": Cron Hijack

Level: Medium

Type: Hack

Access: Email

Description: You are logged in as the user admin. A cron job (not a systemd timer) appears to be running as root every minute, related to a health check.
This server has as root's path /home/admin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

Your mission is to find the running cron job, and use it to exploit the server so you can read the secret file at /root/secret.txt

Save the secret string from the secret file to the file /home/admin/solution.txt.

Test: cat /home/admin/solution.txt displays the same string that is in /root/secret.txt, with md5sum /home/admin/solution.txt returning c6ef5d3ea5e937ae56f8635f91cc727a (the solution string without an ending newline is also accepted)

The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.

Time to Solve: 15 minutes.

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Updated: 2026-10-22 15:52 UTC – f261ca5