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HackTheBox Pterodactyl Writeup

A walkthrough of the HackTheBox 'Pterodactyl' machine. This write-up covers initial access, privilege escalation, and post-exploitation techniques.

HackTheBox Pterodactyl Writeup

Nmap

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┌──(dollarboysushil卐kali)-[~/Documents/htb_boxes/pterodactly]
└─$ nmap -sC -sV 10.129.222.48
Starting Nmap 7.98 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2026-02-09 02:54 -0500
Nmap scan report for 10.129.222.48
Host is up (0.28s latency).
Not shown: 957 filtered tcp ports (no-response), 39 filtered tcp ports (admin-prohibited)
PORT     STATE  SERVICE    VERSION
22/tcp   open   ssh        OpenSSH 9.6 (protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey: 
|   256 a3:74:1e:a3:ad:02:14:01:00:e6:ab:b4:18:84:16:e0 (ECDSA)
|_  256 65:c8:33:17:7a:d6:52:3d:63:c3:e4:a9:60:64:2d:cc (ED25519)
80/tcp   open   http       nginx 1.21.5
|_http-server-header: nginx/1.21.5
|_http-title: Did not follow redirect to http://pterodactyl.htb/
443/tcp  closed https
8080/tcp closed http-proxy

Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at https://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 50.22 seconds


Secured
🔒

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