The description states:  "Can you get past the gate and through the fire?" 

Before I jump into this, I'd like to get a couple of things out of the way.  First, If you're doing this box, I assume you can find your way to the binary.  Second, with very few Windows buffer overflow problems on the Internet, it's nice to find another to work on those skills in a controlled environment.  Add this to the short list with SLMail and Brainpan.

Token impersonation is a technique that allows one user to impersonate another user -- assuming they have the privileges to do so.  In this post, we're going to use Meterpreter but this can be done with other tools as well.  I believe PowerSploit has Invoke-TokenManipulation.ps1 which will do something along the same lines.  Aside from an improper configuration, we could run into this situation where a service account has privileges, we take over that service account, and from there, we can elevate to administrator or NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM.

If an attacker were to get on your network, compromise the domain, and takeover the krbtgt account, creating a golden ticket is an almost guaranteed method for persistence as long as you don't reset the password for that account -- twice.  "The password must be changed twice to effectively remove the password history."  I don't know if there's a "best practice" but according to Ping Castle, or at least its implication, we probably want to change it every 60 days.

In a previous post, I wrote about Exploiting Jenkins.  So what is Jenkins?  "The leading open source automation server, Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project."  My interest in Jenkins is purely from the exploitation side and my avenue for entry has either been through Metasploit or the Groovy Scripting Console.  Like most things hacking, if you really want to learn how to exploit something, you install it, configure it, and deploy it -- you will get a much better understanding of the nuts and bolts.  I rarely see Jenkins, I've yet to go down that rabbit hole and it should come as no surprise then that I discovered another way to get a shell.

Kerbrute:  "A tool to quickly bruteforce and enumerate valid Active Directory accounts through Kerberos Pre-Authentication"

When running Nmap, we come across a server with open SMB ports and we might run Enum4Linux to gather information about the server.  In some cases, like with more modern and hardened servers, we probably won't get a whole lot of information.  But let's say when we run that Nmap scan, we see that Kerberos is running, that gives us another avenue for enumeration.

According to PortSwigger:  "SQL injection is a code injection technique, used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution."  And according to the SQLMap description:  "sqlmap is an open source penetration testing tool that automates the process of detecting and exploiting SQL injection flaws and taking over of database servers."

This isn't a 101 of SQL Injection, if you're familiar with SQLMap, you've moved past 101.  This is the method I use when I leverage SQLMap.  I've seen other syntax for performing these tasks but I prefer to capture the POST request in Burp, dump the contents into a file, and then point SQLMap to my text file POST request.