I'm working on another box but I can't root it.  The initial foothold is very unique and even though I was tempted to write up just that part, I really want to do a full write-up so I'm holding off.  After banging my head far for too long and spending more time than I allot for these diversions, I decided to step back from it for a day or two.  In my "cooling off" period, I fired up another newly released box from Vulnhub titled "RootThis".  

Before I get started with the walk-through, let me point to a post I'd recently written:  Drupal to Reverse Shell

The timing of these articles couldn't be better.  Spending the time working with Drupal and then coming across this box made my life so much easier.

Let's not get too far ahead --

There are a variety of methods for generating payloads and depending on the avenue of attack, one method might prove to be a better route than another.  For example, in my opinion, any sort of .bat file email attachment or web download comes off as a bit more suspicious to me than say an emailed Excel or Word document.  That's not to say that you couldn't get someone to launch a .bat file but it's a lot more likely that someone would open a Word or Excel document from a trusted friend or colleague -- if you were able to spoof email from that trusted friend or colleague.  

It's also been my experience that the protection mechanisms on modern operating systems are getting better.  That is to say that Windows 8 & 10 are better than say Windows 7 and some antivirus products are proving to be a bit more challenging to get around than in years past.  Again, I'm leaning more toward the Office document rather than something that comes off as suspicious to these protections.

Updated:  Drupal 8 Post

The three biggest content management systems (CMS) are:

• WordPress which controls over 50% of the market share.
• Joomla which controls a little over 6% of the market share.
• Drupal which controls a little under 5% of the market share.
  
  

Personally, we've been hosting, developing, and managing WordPress sites for over 5 years.  Joomla is the first CMS we've used and we've been hosting, developing, and managing it for over 10 years.  But when it comes to Drupal, we have very little experience other than exploiting it and almost exclusively with Drupalgeddon in the last few years.  Aside from that, we haven't seen a need to learn yet another content management system for the purpose of using it for its intended design.