eJPT Newbie Unearths Flags in Git Repo, Leaky phpMyAdmin, and phpinfo.php—Proving Manual Sleuthing Beats Nessus Every Time

A recent walkthrough of the eJPT Lab has highlighted the importance of manual investigation in vulnerability assessment. The lab, designed to test pentesting skills, presented a target with open ports revealed through an nmap scan, including a mysql database with version 5.5.47-0, which has weak security measures. Further enumeration using Nmap NSE scripts and exploration of hidden directories, such as the git repository, revealed three flags. The first flag was found in a flag.txt file, the second in a secret_info table in the mysql database, and the third in a phpinfo.php