As someone who abandoned hacking two decades ago, I was really taken aback by that usage of a local web server to transfer shell scripts. What happened to the plain old copy and pasting of scripts through your existing ssh connection, for crying out loud? ;)
While sure, it was probably possible at this point to do that, I can think of a few really good reasons:
- SCP doesn't always work, the SFTP/SCP subsystems can be turned off. This makes it unreliable. In practice, most targets will have it enabled but this could bite you when it doesn't.
- Copy and pasting a 130KB script is not always reliable either, especially if it contains shellcode (you get lovely session- or term-breaking binary data shoved into it). It can work in a pinch but it's less reliable than pretty much all your other options.
- There are categories of attacks that require an out of band connection to exploit, which means you want the server with your tools available somewhere anyways. If it's already set up, why not leverage it?
- You may not have the ability to reliably open a new ssh connection.
Conversely, you have to consider that HTTP traffic may be filtered on egress, monitored, etc.
In my experience, actually getting SSH into the system is typically unnecessary anyways.
Also, you would have been labeled a script kiddie and laughed at for this kind of mostly automated hack in the late 90s.
A script kiddie wasn't a script kiddie because they used scripts sometimes successfully, they were a script kiddie because that's all they could do. Most experienced pentesters I know use linpeas and similar scripts to see if there's any easy low-hanging fruit. It's simpler to do that as a quick check than to run down your own checklist each time. That doesn't mean that's where they stop.
You know, like devs using boilerplate, or people coding using standard libraries, or using a presentation template.
Gosh, I miss those times when hacking was mostly for fun and challenge. Now it seems to be only for work, money or malice.
I'm not sure how you arrived there in this particular thread. Hackthebox and hackthissite and other similar challenge systems, the entire concept of CTFs (check out how many are at ctftime.org) are all for fun challenges to help people learn.