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Secrets Behind the Screens: A Housekeeping Mystery ​

Scenario ​

You’ve been contracted as an external consultant to assess the digital infrastructure of Clean & Tidy Services, a premium housekeeping and cleaning company. While the website presents a sleek, professional interface, your mission is to dig deeper into the system and uncover potential misconfigurations or hidden information.

✅ Questions ​

1. How many paths are not allowed to be indexed by search engines? ​

Websites often use a robots.txt file to instruct search engines on which pages or directories should not be indexed. This file, typically located at http://<website>/robots.txt, can sometimes reveal sensitive paths.

We navigate to http://132.145.13.96:9994/robots.txt and find the following content:

plaintext
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /hidden-files/
Disallow: /admin/

This tells search engines not to index the following three directories:

  1. /private/
  2. /hidden-files/
  3. /admin/

Thus, the answer to this question is 3 paths.

Answer: 3

2. Which path gives access to the admin panel? ​

Since the robots.txt file lists three directories, we attempt to access each one directly in a browser:

  • /private/ → Returns an Internal Server Error (500).
  • /hidden-files/ → Also returns an Internal Server Error (500).
  • /admin/ → Successfully loads an Admin Login Page.

Admin Panel

From this, we confirm that the admin panel is accessible at /admin/.

Answer: /admin/

3. What are the credentials to access the admin panel? ​

Once at the admin login page, we try common default credentials:

  • admin:admin ❌
  • admin:123456 ❌
  • admin:password ✅ Success!

Using admin:password, we successfully log into the panel.

Answer: admin:password

4. What is the flag? ​

After logging in, we are presented with an administrative dashboard. Scanning through the panel, we find a message displaying the flag.

Flag

The flag is now successfully retrieved.