Your foothold and the goal

You are an unprivileged user

This course runs on one Linux machine inside your browser. You are logged in as student — an ordinary user with no admin rights. This is exactly the position an attacker is in after they first break into a server: they have a shell, but not a root shell. Confirm who you are:

whoami
id

In the terminal

student@vulntech:~$ whoami
student
student@vulntech:~$ id
uid=1000(student) gid=1000(student) groups=1000(student)

Notice what is missing from your groups: there is no sudo. On the other machines in this series student could just run sudo -i and become root. Not here. Try it and watch it refuse you:

sudo -n true

In the terminal (sudo rejects you: you are not allowed to run commands as root this way)

student@vulntech:~$ sudo -n true
sudo: a password is required

The goal: become root

Somewhere on this machine the administrator left a mistake — in fact, several. Each one lets an ordinary user quietly turn themselves into root, the all-powerful superuser. Your job is to find a mistake and use it. You will know you have won when you can read the file that only root is allowed to open:

ls -l /root/root.txt
cat /root/root.txt

In the terminal (you cannot read it yet — that is the whole point of the course)

student@vulntech:~$ ls -l /root/root.txt
ls: cannot access '/root/root.txt': Permission denied
student@vulntech:~$ cat /root/root.txt
cat: /root/root.txt: Permission denied

That file holds the flag, a short marker string. Reading it proves you reached root. Turning the foothold you start with into that root shell is called privilege escalation, and it is one of the most important skills in offensive security.

Tip: Nothing here touches the network and nothing you do can harm a real system. Break things freely — every lab resets the machine to a clean state when it starts.