recon_12 (load balance)

View the exercise here: PentesterLab: Recon 12

OBJECTIVE

For this challenge, your goal is to access a load-balanced application hosted at the address balancer.hackycorp.com.

LOAD BALANCING

Serving requests for a single application can be done by multiple backends. It can pay off to send the same request multiple times to check if multiple backends are involved.

SOLUTION

Solution # 1:

Enter curl balancer.hackycorp.com in the terminal repeatedly until you get the flag

Solution # 2:

Create a Python code that will curl the site repeatedly:

import subprocess

# URL to be fetched
url = "balancer.hackycorp.com"

while True:
    try:
        # Execute the curl command
        result = subprocess.run(['curl', url], capture_output=True, text=True)
        
        # Print the output
        print(result.stdout.strip())
        
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        print("Stopped by user")
        break

Then run the python code:

python3 curlsite.py