PortSwigger's "Unprotected admin functionality" Walkthrough
This is a super brief writeup of the first Apprentice-level access control lab from Portswigger Academy.
Before we get started, you’ll need a Portswigger Academy account. Log in and then view the lab at https://portswigger.net/web-security/access-control/lab-unprotected-admin-functionality
. This is accessible from the “all labs” view.
Challenge Information
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Click the “Access the Lab” button and you will be taken to a temporary website that is created for your account. This will be in format https://<random string here>.web-security-academy.net/
.
This challenge requires us to find an unprotected admin panel, then delete Carlos’ account.
The website is our typical shopping site:
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There’s nothing interesting in the page source. If we look at robots.txt, there’s an entry relevant to our interests:
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If we browse to https://<random-string>.web-security-academy.net/administrator-panel
, we realize that we’ve found the unprotected admin panel:
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All that’s left to do is delete Carlos’ account, and we’ve solved the lab!
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This might seem unrealistic but simple mistakes like not securing admin interfaces (especially default ones) does occur.