Exploiting a vulnerable Linux VM

Now that we have finished scanning both the hosts in the vulnerable lab, it is time to start exploitation of these hosts. Our first target is the Ubuntu instance that we set up in our lab. Here, we shall go through the scan results for this host and try to gain unauthorized access to the host.

Understanding the Nessus scan for Linux

We first start with the Nessus scan results for our Ubuntu server host:

Unsurprisingly, we just find a bunch of information vulnerabilities, since there are just two services installed—FTP and SSH. The FTP server has a backdoor baked into it; however, it has not come out as a critical vulnerability. If you look at the last result in the Linux scan, it does...